Drama School 2012 Mission Log - Entry 3: RADA Recall

RADA Recall: If nothing else, at least I’ll come out of all this in the knowledge that I did do at least a little bit better than last year.

Quite how much better I’m going to have done, though, remains to be seen, because after today I’m not entirely sure what to think.

After my initial excitement about the fact that I got a recall (for a change) wore off somewhat, I was left with a determination not to be a) cocky, b) too relaxed, or c) anxious to “up my game” in some way from what clearly worked the first time round, even though this was a recall. And I think (based on my reflections before I actually know the result) I succeeded, to an extent.

But I do think the key phrase there is “to an extent”.

I mean, I wasn’t cocky, I know that for a fact. I was pretty nervous about the whole thing and certainly wouldn’t describe myself as “relaxed”, so there was no chance of me going in there and thinking I could blag my way through it. And I had been telling myself constantly that there was no need to feel that I should try and do something drastically different from what I did before, because this second round is basically just another, slightly glorified, first round, to see if the original panel’s initial impressions were accurate or if it was a one-off. Seeing as I was pretty certain it wasn’t a one-off, because I had prepared thoroughly for my speeches, I said to myself that I should just go in and do what I did before, albeit with extra focus and attention to make sure I did it right (the Principal of RADA was on the panel, after all…).

“What could possibly go wrong?” I hear you cry. Actually, I don’t hear you, I’m sitting here on my own, at 11.10pm in my living room, and if a disembodied voice suddenly started speaking to me out of nowhere right now I’d probably shit my pants.

But anyway, working on the assumption that I asked myself that question, the answer is, “I’m not entirely sure”. It’s very hard to describe what I felt today. I woke up nice and early, I did everything by the book, got my preparation pretty much spot on, got there in plenty of time, read over my notes, etc. etc. But somehow, something just wasn’t quite right today. It wasn’t far off, but even from the moment I woke up, it just wasn’t quite there. Maybe it was because it was my first recall audition and it was having some sort of subconscious effect on me – like how a footballer sometimes plays worse when he gets called up for England for the first time than he does when he plays for his club, week in, week out, even though he just has to do the same thing that he does normally. Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to compare myself to a footballer, I don’t know…

I was the only person there when I arrived, but the girl who I mentioned in my post about the first RADA audition arrived a little while after me (didn’t I say I knew she’d get a recall?), which was nice, because it was good to have a friendly face there. But, annoyingly, while we were waiting to be called in, she recognised somebody who was walking through the entrance hall who she presumably hadn’t seen for quite some time, and proceeded to have a massive hug and “Hello!!” with them, which just served to remind me that I don’t know anybody at any drama school at all and that she, unlike me, had already been offered a place at a top drama school this year…

So that certainly didn’t help with psychologically preparing myself.

Anyway. I’m really struggling to find a way to describe how it felt, and this might not do the trick, but please bear with me – I’ll give it a go. Today, it felt like I was a lawnmower (bear with me, I said…); one of those power mowers that you have to pull the cord on to get it to start. It’s a pretty expensive mower, and it’s built well – all the parts work nicely, they’ve all been designed with fancy Mac laptops and oiled with WD40 Extra Smooth Glide or something – all in all, it’s a pretty handy machine, and naturally you’d expect it to do a good job of cutting your lawn. Now normally, when you want to start mowing, you pull the cord and the motor fires up. All the parts work perfectly and all the power inside the motor is delivered to all the correct components and it all works nicely and seamlessly, as it’s been designed to do. And you mow your lawn. Now imagine that one day you get your lawnmower, which is still really new-looking, with parts that mesh together really nicely and smoothly and which still work just as brilliantly as how they did when they were first designed and manufactured, and you try to mow your lawn with it. And you pull the cord, and the mechanism spins around inside, like it normally does when you pull the cord, but the motor just doesn’t kick in, for some reason. The cord pulls out fine, and the actual blades at the bottom of the lawnmower briefly turn as they usually do when you pull out the cord, but only for a second, because the engine just doesn’t want to start. Theoretically, you can still mow your lawn without the motor starting, because you have the power to turn the blades at what is still a pretty high speed by just quickly pulling the cord over and over again, and so that’s exactly what you do; you push the mower along your lawn while repeatedly pulling the cord to turn the blades at the bottom. And your grass does get cut.

But it’s not as easy as when the motor does it for you, and you can’t quite turn the blades at the same speed as the motor can, nor do so with the same level of consistency as with the motor. And you get to the end of your lawn and stop, and look back at what you’ve done, and you see that the grass has definitely been cut, and it doesn’t look too bad, but you’re sweating a lot, and your arm aches, and if you look closely there are little patches where the lawn hasn’t been cut as evenly as it would have been with the motor working, and it’s taken you a bit longer than it would have done normally, and just overall, despite your best efforts (and you haven’t done a bad job, considering you have no engine) it still just doesn’t look quite right.

That’s how I felt today. I’d put all the work in, I’d designed the framework and the mechanisms for doing well by practising my speeches and working them with the lovely lady I do them with and I felt confident that if I did them well it wouldn’t be a fluke, it would be down to my hard work. I wasn’t stabbing in the dark, I was following clearly laid tracks that I knew would lead me in the right direction, because I put a lot of effort into designing and working on them. In other words, I just needed some impetus, some kind of drive inside to utilise that framework as effectively as I could possibly utilise it. But for some reason, and maybe I’ll never know why, when I woke up today I just couldn’t feel it inside me. I know that sounds stupid but it’s the truth. I did everything I could to get it working: I ate a good breakfast, did a lot of walking and running around and hopping on the spot, I read over my notes and really tried to think about my characters and shouted stuff at myself in my head, but somehow it just wasn’t happening. It was like the real me was hiding inside, desperately trying to pump some kind of drive into me. I could feel him oiling the cogs and wheels inside me, putting all his effort into trying to get myself ready, and then when doing the speeches, pulling and pulling on the cord to get the gears turning as fast as he could, but it just didn’t quite catch in the same way as I know it can do when the motor really gets going by itself. He did his absolute best, and probably ended up creating a pretty passable imitation of what I can do when I’m working completely properly, but to me, a fairly seasoned examiner of my own ability, I know I can do a lot, lot better.

And that does suck, because this was a really big chance for me.

But I am not beating myself up about it too much. Why? Because I know there was nothing more I could have done. As I said before, I tried everything. I have experienced that feeling before when acting, admittedly not in quite such an important situation, and I know there’s often very little you can do to change it. I’m sure it happens to lots of people fairly regularly, and it just ended up happening to me today. If I had just accepted it and let myself be rubbish then I would be seriously kicking myself because I wouldn’t have been trying. But I was trying – I tried as hard as I could to get it going, and I think I made the best of a bad situation. The little version of me deep inside pulling on the cords and turning the gears did the best job he could have done with the limited resources available to him. He did have an excellent lawnmower available to him and he did a decent job of mowing the lawn with it, even if the power to really make good use of that mower tended to come in slightly frustrating fits and bursts as opposed to in a nice, constant stream. And I know for certain that I’m not making all this up as an excuse because barely an hour after I got out of there, I felt completely normal again! All day since then I have felt the same as how I felt yesterday. I have felt normal. And it was through no conscious effort of mine that I got back to feeling normal again – it just happened. There was nothing else I could have done to make it happen any sooner, and as such I can’t give myself stick about it not quite happening in the audition room. I did the best I could.

Thankfully, though, the audition wasn’t just two pieces. There was an interview as well, and a song, and to start with the former, I felt like I did give a pretty good account of myself when I sat down to chat to them. This being a recall audition, and there being two extra panellists compared to last time, there were more questions for me to answer than before, so it’s just as well I spent so long preparing for the interview. Lots of smiling, lots of eye contact (not weirdly so, I hope…) and LOTS of positivity and enthusiasm about everything. I have trained myself to do this now, and as it’s what I did in the first round, it must have worked to an extent, seeing as I found myself sitting there in a recall audition today. I talked about the play I’d seen recently (the same as I did in the first round, but in slightly more detail this time), I talked about what I was up to at the moment and what my plans were, I talked about what my other interests were (football, French and biology, apparently) and I talked about my speeches. I think I picked up on a slightly cheeky “catch-him-out”-style question when I was asked if I had read the plays and where I found my modern monologue (“in an audition book?”). NO! NEVER AN AUDITION BOOK!!! If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that you never say you found it in an audition book. Now, I won’t lie, it was from an audition book (which is maybe why they asked, because it’s probably quite a commonly used speech), but that wasn’t for lack of trying to find one in a play somewhere. It’s damn difficult to find a good speech; I’ve spent hours and hours trawling through plays at French’s and the National Theatre Bookshop and I certainly wouldn’t have gone with this one if I didn’t feel like it was absolutely perfect for me, which it definitely is. But no, I told them I read the play first, which was fine anyway because I knew I could answer questions on the play because since finding the speech I have read the play a couple of times over and know it quite well.

But anyway. Overall the interview went very well. I reflected afterwards that I probably wouldn’t have traded my good interview for doing my monologues better, because I felt like I did make a fairly good impression, which I think is important (of course it would have been great to have good monologues and a good interview, but oh well…). As I say, I was pretty happy with this aspect of the audition.

And then, finally, the song. Now, I don’t like singing all that much. I’m not bad I guess, but I’m definitely not great. Thankfully my song is a fun song to do and I enjoy doing it, but again the numbness I felt earlier with the speeches came back to me with the song. I just didn’t quite give it everything that I know I can give it. But I didn’t fluff any notes and I think I got the ending pretty much right, which is important, and it wasn’t bad overall, I guess. But, rather like the speeches, just not incredible.

I left the room and sort of slumped against a wall for a moment. I felt physically drained. I genuinely did feel like there had been somebody inside me working their arse off to try and make things happen, and by the time it was over I had been left pretty exhausted somehow. The nice girl asked me how it went and I said it was ok (which was about the best reply I could muster) but that I really wasn’t sure, which was true. She had mentioned earlier that she thought her first round audition hadn’t been great and that she was really surprised when she got a recall, and reminded me now of that, and that I shouldn’t think about it too much because sometimes you think you’ve done well and you haven’t, and vice-versa. Of course, her version (her, now officially soon-to-be-Acting-Student-of-Drama-Centre version) of “not doing that great” is probably my equivalent of acting my heart out, but oh well.

I can’t say for certain whether I did or didn’t get another recall. It wasn’t clear cut to me, which I think is a good thing, at least. There’s a possibility there that it went a bit better than I thought. One thing that’s true for these auditions is that you never know for sure, I guess. But my performances just could have been a bit more effective than they ended up being, that’s all.

Anyway, that was that: my first recall, gone forever. It’s a two-week wait now before I find out if I got through to the third round, but as far as I’m concerned, my next audition is for Guildhall on the 10^th April, followed swiftly by LAMDA on the 11^th. RADA is history now – I think it’s best to think of it that way for the time being.

But I’ll look back on today and know that I tried my hardest. It might not have come off 100% but there was nothing more, on the day, that I could have done.

I think I should just be happy that I got a recall, really. It was a nice feeling.