LAMDA: Barons Court. Or is it Baron’s Court? Why is it
Earl’s Court and not Baron’s Court? Is it the court of one baron in particular,
or is it a court of several barons, cohabitating? To my mind at least, the earl
had one court and the baron had another, and so the places should both have
apostrophes in their names. I mean if there was one court with just one earl in
it, and another just down the road with tonnes of barons kicking around, surely
there would have been an uprising at some point, with the various barons and
their assorted henchmen deciding to take on the one, unsupported earl in a
battle? Or were they at different time periods, and as such never actually made
contact with one another? Or was there just a lazy transcriber who sometimes
just couldn’t be arsed to write apostrophes?
Perhaps we’ll never know. Or at
least, I definitely won’t, because I’m far too lazy to Google it, and it’s more
fun imagining a fight between the barons and the earl anyway. But either way,
there I was, at Barons Court, with, oddly enough, my fellow drama school auditionee
friend, who happened to be auditioning on exactly the same day as me. The
school was very easy to find, being just round the corner from the station,
which in turn was easy to get to, being a simple trip on the District Line from
my house (actually, travelling on the District Line is never simple, but that’s
another topic entirely).
Now, I had actually been on a
tour of LAMDA previously, so I already was somewhat familiar with the building
itself (something that I couldn’t say for any of the other schools). I think
that this familiarity, along with its fantastic accessibility for me,
contributed to the fact that I wanted to go there for my summer course in 2011
so much, as opposed to any of the other London-based drama schools, despite the
fact that my audition was a pretty rubbish experience overall. The auditions at
LAMDA are a curious thing indeed. Like many other schools, you audition on your
own as opposed to in groups, but, somewhat unsettlingly, you have to stay
behind a line that feels miles away from the audition panel. They say it’s so
that they can see your “whole body” as opposed to a closer view that doesn’t
give them a proper perspective on how you act with your entire self. I don’t
know or care particularly, but it was a little bit weird being so far away. It
didn’t help, either, that the student helping with the auditions did their best
job to freak me out about ten seconds before I entered the room by giving me
the instructions “not to shake the auditioners’ hands or make eye contact” (or something
like that anyway) upon entering the room, not to mention that I ended up being
put in the room right next to the busy main road outside the school, and the
sound of the traffic basically ended up drowning out my speeches… The
auditioners seemed a little intimidating, and didn’t seem really to want to
speak to me very much, but I get the feeling that LAMDA have this fairly cold
audition process so as not to raise auditionees’ hopes too much, which I guess
I can hardly complain about – my hopes certainly weren’t too high after this
audition.
I did the speeches, and they
went ok (I was steadily improving with each audition, I felt). I had kept my
modern monologue but I had finally abandoned ship with the Shakespeare and gone
for something a little more appropriate in terms of age and life experience. Looking
back on it now, it was still pretty rubbish, and to be honest, my modern was
looking a little ropey by this point too (it would be changed before my RADA
audition). But I think it was a better overall performance than either of the
two previous auditions, and at the time, at least, I didn’t feel too bad about
how it went at all, although the lack of response from the audition panel
dampened much of the (misguided) hope I may have had.
The interview was a bit
disconcerting. Two fairly attractive (female) members of the administrative
team sat me down on a sofa in a small room and said they just wanted to have an
informal chat and “find out a little more about me”. Having had no formal
interview preparation whatsoever, I think I took the sentiment a little bit too
much to heart, and ended up sounding, I think, fairly casual about things and
lacking in real motivation and desire; I remember at one point talking about an
Edinburgh Fringe show as “something I’d seen at the theatre recently” (bearing
in mind this was November…). Anyway, to sum up, for my £44 I got myself a nice
little chat and a second look round the school. But no recall. At least I
wasn’t alone – my friend didn’t get one either…
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