Central: New year. New me. I could do this. I was there
early, and went and sat in the nice theatre space after you go through the main
entrance, where we were told to wait for instructions. The auditorium gradually
filled up. Then filled up some more. Then some more. There were about 200 of us
by the time everyone arrived. It looked to me, right there and then, to be a
hell of a lot of people for only twenty places.
And then I realised… There were
about FOURTEEN more of these
first round auditions being held on other days…
SOOOOO
MANY
PEOPLE!!!
If I felt I wouldn’t stand a
chance of being one of twenty successful candidates out of the group I was in
now, what chance did I have competing against 3000 others??
But I couldn’t think like that
now. We got taken through what I recall seemed to be some kind of child’s playground
or something, then round a corner through what felt like a greenhouse(??) and
then into a big hall, where I found a space and sat down.
A nice lady came and chatted to
us and then we all had a massive group warm-up, which was really great for
calming my insane nerves. We were told we would be split into groups of ten or
so, and would complete a tour, a monologue session and a workshop, in any
order. Our group had the tour first, which I guess was a good way to calm down
a bit, and then the monologues, and then the workshop.
I got a really good feeling
from Central, actually. I liked the style of the place, I liked the massive
community feel about it, and the people there seemed genuinely nice.
We went into the audition room,
which again felt nice. We all sat on the chairs either side of a main
performance space (I think this was a big reason why I liked the place – I much
prefer having group auditions to individual ones). Having never seen a drama
school audition speech from somebody I hadn’t met before, it was nice for me to
see that, somewhat surprisingly, the other people weren’t drama gods/goddesses
as I had imagined, but rather of a varied range of ability, of which I felt I
fitted quite comfortably into at least the middle, or even a little higher,
perhaps.
The one annoying thing about
Central is their incredibly stupid list of classical speeches that for some
absurd reason you have to pick from for your audition. I have absolutely no
idea why they feel the need to do this, and it seems counter-intuitive to me,
to offer parts that people might not be suitable for playing, but there you go.
I was last, as always. I did my
modern first, which I had had some help with since the RADA audition. It got a
good reaction from people, who laughed and were nicely quiet in the right moments.
I think the panel liked it too. It’s a shame that the classical was a bit of a
last minute botch-job by me, because I think with more care I might have done
better, but it’s a bit late for that now. It could have gone worse, I suppose.
It certainly wasn’t the worst that I saw of the people in my group, that’s for
sure.
After the monologues, we had
the workshop. I love these things – they kind of feel like bread and butter to
me now after having done so many similar sorts of things for so many years. There
was lots of running, hopping, fooling around, being told to “become a slice of bread" or "the colour
yellow” and various things like that. I think I’m good at these sorts of
things, but would it pay off after my underwhelming Shakespeare speech earlier?
We would be told after lunch.
I felt a bit ill really so
didn’t eat much for lunch and I didn’t exactly have the best hour of my life,
killing time before we could return to the school, but I was told at one point
by somebody in my group that I looked like Ben Stiller, which I found mildly
amusing and took as a compliment, so I guess that was something. We returned
and sat down in our groups in the hall that we had done our warm-up in earlier
on. They basically read out a list of names for each group of the people who
would be staying on that afternoon for the recall audition. My group came and
went. My name was not on the list. Out of the ten of us, three had been given
recalls, one of which I definitely thought hadn’t been that great in her
audition, but then perhaps my judgement of these things isn’t the best.
And that was that, again. 2011
was starting off in pretty much the same way 2010 ended. I was a bit
disappointed, because I thought I had done well all day apart from the
Shakespeare, which was a bit under-par, but then I reasoned, you have got to
bring the whole package – you can’t under-perform in one area and expect the
others to make up for it.
And as I hopped on the Tube at
Swiss Cottage, I looked back on the day, and then at all my other auditions. I
had improved as I went along – I was certain. My modern speech was strong. My
Shakespeare was less so. But I had so far failed to improve on my “100% failure
rate” since Bristol, and after five auditions, that wasn’t a good statistic to
have.
Would there be enough time to improve
before Drama Centre? I had a couple of weeks to work on it, but now other
problems were threatening to interfere with my preparations…
A-Level-shaped
problems…
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