Drama School 2012 Mission Log - Entry 5: LAMDA

LAMDA: I’m struggling to think of a clever way to start this entry, so I’ll cut to the chase.

I think my audition at LAMDA was very good. Sort of.

As I walked out of Baron’s Court Station and down Talgarth Road I couldn’t help but feel a warm smile slowly spreading across my face as memories of my two weeks spent there the summer before came back to me. I don’t really know if this is what people mean when they say that a place “feels right” for them… With me and LAMDA, there are two possibilities: 1) the place always felt right to me, which is why I did my summer course there and became more comfortable with the surroundings, meaning that I now enjoy time spent there even more, or 2) I only like it because I spent two weeks there in the summer, and the connection I feel with it is only down to familiarity and nothing more meaningful than that. Thinking back now, I can’t really tell which of the two it was.

Though to be honest, does it really matter either way? The point is that I felt comfortable walking into the building, more comfortable than I did at any of the other schools by a long stretch (and no I’m not just ignoring RWCMD because they rejected me). As if that wasn’t enough to get me pumped up about the audition, that morning I had been fortunate enough to take part in a Q&A session with the actor Gethin Anthony who happened to have gone to LAMDA, so that served to focus my mind even more on the task ahead of me.

So I went into the building (managing to do a good impression of a gorilla by violently rattling the door several times as I tried to open it, before realising I had to push a button to get it to release) and was met by a lady who ticked me off on a piece of paper she had in front of her. We made small talk for a bit (I tried to seem nice and amiable and probably failed), before being taken to the common room area by a student, accompanied by three other auditionees who all looked about my age. The student left us alone for a bit and the usual audition chat took place about our speeches and where we had travelled from and so on (not instigated by me, I might add – I’m not really a fan of using my audition prep time to discuss my Tube journey…). When he returned, the student told me that I was actually in the time slot after that of the other three auditionees, and that I should wait around in the common room for a while until it was my time, which would be in about half an hour. Thankfully, the other people that were supposed to be in the same time slot as me didn’t turn up until just before the audition time, so I used the time to jump up and down and run around in the empty space of the common room, go over the start of my speeches and just generally warm up. (I also used quite a large chunk of the time to go to the toilet, but I didn’t think you needed to know that. But now I’ve said it anyway… I guess I could delete what I just wrote. But then I’d feel like I wasn’t giving an accurate portrayal of my day, which I guess is the whole point of this… Oh screw it, I’ll leave it in…)

When my time arrived, I walked with the student back to the main entrance area when another student, this time a girl, came and showed me to just outside the room I would be auditioning in. Of course, it happened to be the one bloody room that I only went into once during my whole two weeks there in the summer. Typical…

Anyway, I sat outside there for a bit, trying to make sure I stayed focused, before the girl told me that the panel were ready to see me now, and that I could either go straight in, or take a couple of minutes to prepare myself.

I took a couple of minutes to prepare myself.

When I decided that I was ready, the student told me that when I went into the room the panel would say hello to me and ask me what my two speeches were, before letting me perform the speeches in whatever order I wanted to, and then that would be it.

Now, I remember this aspect of LAMDA’s audition process being the absolute most intimidating thing ever last year, the fact that the panel barely spoke a word to me seeming really unhelpful in terms of relaxing my nerves etc. But having had a sort of “inside view” of the auditions (even to the small extent that I did), I now found the fact that they whistled through each audition a completely understandable necessity. I took comfort in knowing that I was well-acquainted with the sort of thing that the panel wanted to see in those few minutes, and that I had prepared well for giving my best in that short time allotted to me.

I took a very deep breath.

This was it. This was massive. This was my favourite place. This was where I did my course in the summer. This was where I felt like I had the best chance out of anywhere. I had to give it my best shot.

And so I started.

And it was good. I think it was, anyway. In fact, I felt that it went really well, overall. It was probably the best I can remember actually acting in an audition, now I think about it.

So I said thank you and left the room feeling like I had just won the lottery. There was a pretty insane grin on my face, anyway…

Actually, I think the student waiting for me outside was a bit freaked out by it.

But hopefully she wasn’t. She took me through to the main foyer area where I sat again for a while, looking at the various photos on the wall of past LAMDA productions and trying to make out the names of the people pictured in them. I was actually feeling really, really happy. I was back in my favourite school. I had just done what I felt was a very good audition, for me. I knew how to act in interviews by now. The hard bit was surely over, right?

Well.

To be honest with you, I think that this feeling of happiness was the problem. I’m not suggesting that I was unhappy to feel so comfortable in the school, and to have enjoyed my time there as much as I did. On the contrary, I think it helped me focus my pre-audition nerves and use them to my advantage (though only time will tell). The problem was that, whereas before my audition I felt comfortable in my surroundings while still feeling nervous, now I just felt comfortable in my surroundings without any nerves at all. It was a bizarre feeling, considering the situation.

I genuinely felt like I was just relaxing in my living room. And as you can probably imagine, this really wasn’t the best mental state to be in just before an important interview.

I mean, sure, I think I was pleasant enough to talk to, which is good I guess. But the problem was a lack of focus on my part. I think I just assumed that, like at RADA, I would be asked a few probing questions to which I could give my carefully prepared answers to, and feel satisfied. But those questions never came. They asked me about some factual things, like where else I was auditioning and so on, and then asked me what I was doing at the moment. I gave a brief outline of what I had been doing, omitting a few details, and left it at that really, expecting to then hear something a bit more challenging, perhaps along the lines of, “Who is your favourite actor?” or “Why do you want to come to LAMDA?” or something. But it didn’t happen.

That was it.

I left the room in a little bit of a haze, slightly confused as to how my interview could have passed in such a fashion. I think a big factor in my surprise was the fact that the previous year’s interview had included a question about the last piece of theatre I had been to see, which at least had offered something for me to get my teeth in to. But this year, I got nothing of the sort.

And I’ve spent the two weeks since the audition absolutely kicking myself, really.

At the time, I thought that I was being warmed up into the tricky questions – which would be my chance to get them interested – by being asked about what I was doing at the moment. But now I look back on it, that question was my chance to get them interested. And I just didn’t take it. I could have mentioned so many different things that would have been exciting and that showed my enthusiasm and dedication and passion and desire and drive...

But I missed my chance. Based on that interview, I may well have seemed like the most boring person in the world, compared to other people who took that chance and made themselves stand out. My failure to give them what they wanted to hear, which I know I could have done, might well just be the difference between getting a recall and not getting one. And now I’m kicking myself.

So I left LAMDA feeling a bizarre combination of ridiculously pleased and incredibly pissed off. It’s now been almost two weeks since the audition, so I’m expecting the result in the post any time now.

And I love the school so much, and it would really make me so genuinely thrilled to get a recall there, but right now, I honestly don’t know what that result is going to be.

So cross your fingers and your toes for me, please – I’m going to need it…

Drama School 2012 Mission Log - Entry 4: Guildhall

Guildhall: So, there I was. Two auditions at two of the best drama schools in the world with barely a day between them.

*Gulp*

Not to be fazed, however, I launched myself out of bed on Tuesday morning at the adventurous hour of 6.45am, only to feel a bit light-headed and sit back down again. A few moments of pulling myself together, and confirming to my clearly befuddled brain that I was indeed awake pre-7am, allowed me to stand up once more and proceed with my morning ministrations.

I felt good. I had wanted to shake things up a bit after RADA and I reckoned that I had done, with a fresh take on the Shakespeare and some minor tweaks to the modern speech ensuring that I felt on my toes once more. One somewhat frustrating Tube journey later, in which I felt as if I walked the length of a half-marathon through underground tunnels between lines, I found myself at the Guildhall reception desk being directed up the stairs and told to follow the signs from there.

I was obscenely early.

But to be honest, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. I was the second person there, and at least this way I got to feel a bit more comfortable in the building and make sure I planned routes to at least two toilets, in case one of them was being used (I find that easily-accessible toilets can prove vital on audition days…).

Once I had settled down a bit and more people had arrived, proceedings got underway. We were all given a number (I was “7” – a good sign? a magic number??) and then were split into groups and taken into separate rooms to complete a workshop, much the same as I remembered doing from the year before. The student who was telling us about the workshop let slip that we “weren’t being judged much – I mean, at all” at this stage of the audition… Hmm…

I was taking no chances and set about throwing myself into all the exercises that we were being asked to do. When he asked people to freeze and then said, “Three people move”, I moved. When he asked for a first “brave” volunteer, I volunteered. I didn’t want to seem pushy so made sure to hold back at times and let other people get in there first, but I certainly feel I showed myself as somebody willing to take risks, which I assume is what they’re looking for.

But, of course, we weren’t being judged at that stage, so I suppose it didn’t matter…

There was one man and one woman running the workshop and they told us that they would be the panel that we would be performing to later on. The man told us all that he was a director there, and then gave us some “advice” for our speeches, basically saying that they want to see “you” (whoever that is) and not “Richard with his hump” or somebody with a funny accent or something like that. Which I understand, but there was just something slightly funny in the way he said it. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I just thought it was a bit weird how much they emphasised that they don’t want to see a character, they just want to see you. Again, I do understand to an extent, that you can’t just be somebody completely removed from your experience and that you have to try and bring yourself to every part etc. etc., but there was something there that just felt a bit uninspiring to me. No other school really says that so explicitly as Guildhall do, and I got the sense that they would look down on me, say, making a point of adjusting my posture to help me as I became a different character, which just seems slightly weird to me. To me, at least, becoming somebody different (losing yourself in a combination of semi-conscious physical, vocal, intellectual and emotional decisions and shifts made just before and then during the course of the time in character) is what makes the whole thing exciting, but there you go.

Before we left the room we were also told that we should try and do our speeches while looking into the eyes of the panel because they like that. I was a bit thrown by this, as my speeches, especially the modern, rely quite heavily on some mental imagery I’ve put together for myself, and I felt that doing it to real faces that most certainly did not resemble the girl of my dreams (as required for the modern speech) would not be of much help to me. They told me, however, that I should just do my best to do it to their eyes anyway, so that was helpful…

Anyway, after the workshop was done we all sat back down in the room that we first arrived in and waited to be called up in the order of the numbers we had been given. A relatively long wait, then, for me at number 7, and I got chatting to another guy who was in my group who had the number 9. A lovely Irish guy who it turned out had been doing the RADA foundation course earlier this year and was now working in the bar there.

RADA, eh?…

RADA… Yes…

Mmmm… RADA…

RADA…

Mmmmmmm…

…

“NO! No dwelling on the past! Bad Harry! Back to the present!”

Sorry about that.

Eventually, my number was called and one of the students (a guy who I soon found out was aged 21 and in his first year of the BA course) took me out to the corridor to wait until I was called in to do the audition. He was an absolutely fantastic guy, really nice and friendly, who I ended up chatting quite a lot to as I wasn’t called in for some time. He had got in on his third year of applications and had got to the final round of LAMDA and had been offered a place at Rose Bruford, but chose Guildhall instead (unsurprisingly). I asked him about the whole “looking into the panel’s eyes” issue and he said that he would stand in for my characters and I could do my monologues to him, if I liked (to be fair, he had quite an attractive, clean-shaven face, so I felt it would be less of a leap to imagine him as a girl I fancied than a slightly podgy middle-aged lady…).

We went in to the room and I did my two speeches to the student – I felt that both went very well, if not absolutely magnificently – and then I sat down for my interview with the panel. Or at least I thought it was going to be an interview – they only asked me two questions: what I was doing at the moment and how my other drama school applications were going…

I left the room with a mouth that felt like the Sahara Desert with a hosepipe ban. I had a quick drink from the handy water fountain in the corridor (though the first time I tried to do this, the jet of water zoomed so viciously out of the tap that it went straight past my open mouth – it hit me on the chest so hard I think it might have actually left a bruise) before being led back in to the room we had been waiting in earlier. The nice student mentioned that he thought my speeches were very good and that he almost corpsed during my modern despite his insistence earlier that he definitely wouldn’t. I took that as a good sign, as the speech is meant to be funny as well as affecting, and I had felt at the time that I had got the affecting part down quite well so was pleased to hear that it was funny too.

Or maybe he was bullshitting me.

Either way, I was done now, and was definitely prepared to wait the half an hour required until the results were announced. I passed the time by figuring out how much money a school like Guildhall makes in audition fees each year. If the average audition fee is about £40 for a good school, and they have (as Guildhall did last year) 2,300 people auditioning, that comes to almost £100,000 each year! No wonder they charge for auditions – imagine how much money they’d lose out on if they didn’t!

Anyway, soon enough the panel appeared, announcing that there were to be three recalls out of the 12 or so of us in the room. I tried to relax and failed miserably. The three names were read out. I held my breath. None of them were mine. I breathed again.

Slight disappointment, true. Certainly not happiness. But acceptance.

I accepted their decision.

I have applied twice to Guildhall now. Neither time have I been given a recall. They operate a system by which you are only permitted to apply twice to the school before they shut you off and don’t let you try again. So that’s that, now. I will quite possibly never go there again in my life.

But to be honest with you, I’m not really all that bothered. I don’t think I was right for them, but equally as importantly, I don’t think the place was right for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the building (I did, it was nice). I had a great experience with their students, as the guy who went into the audition room with me was fantastic. It’s actually something slightly deeper than that which jarred with me. I think that the panel said something that I can look back on now and understand much better than I did at the time.

(The following is really just a theory. It might well be completely wrong. I am presenting it to you because I think it might be of interest, but I do feel strongly that it would be foolish to take anything that I say next too much to heart, as it really represents only my opinion and not that of anybody else. Apologies if this becomes a bit verbose, but as you can probably tell by now, when I have something to say, I really do have something to say…)

The audition panel told us that they were ‘looking for something very specific, and just because you may not be right for Guildhall does not mean that you wouldn’t sail straight in to another drama school’. Now, on one level that could be read as simply trying to make people feel better when they don’t get a recall (as is statistically likely to happen), but I think there is definitely a certain element of truth to it. What I think Guildhall want, which differs from places like RADA and LAMDA, is for people to literally not act whatsoever. What I mean by that is that they want people to literally just speak as themselves, saying the words as they might say them, as themselves, in real life. I understand that idea, and I understand that saying things as yourself is basically what good acting is, but I also think that there is a limit to how much you can just be yourself and that you have to, at some point, try and bring something else to the table that is not just literally you speaking. I think there’s an art to acting, and also a technique, and I don’t think either of those things were what Guildhall were looking for in their auditions. They literally wanted to see ME speaking. I don’t think they wanted to see me change into somebody. They didn’t want to see the technique of a change in voice or posture or mannerisms or movement, no matter how natural it seemed. They didn’t care whether my speech was well-structured and pieced together. They didn’t even really want to see much emotion (and I’m not talking about emoting here, which is bad, I mean emotions as a natural by-product of the character’s objectives in relation to their given circumstances). I think they wanted me to just forget all pretences of acting and be another character in name only. They wanted to hear me talk to them, into their eyes, as me, which of course, wanting to play another character in another world, I didn’t do. I used their student who was willing to act the part with me, which helped me feel like I wasn’t in a room with an audition panel and that I really was a different person speaking to somebody about something that mattered to me, when in actual fact, what the panel wanted to see was me being me. They didn’t want me to use my life experience to inform my incarnation of somebody else. They didn’t want to see me change. They didn’t want to see a character. They wanted me to do that oh-so-difficult thing of just being me, Harry, telling somebody else’s story. But they didn’t want me to become a part of that story. They wanted the story to become a part of me.

Or at least, that’s how it felt to me. I might be completely wrong. I might be talking total rubbish and I just wasn’t good enough.

In fact, there’s a high chance that might well have been 475 words of total bollocks.

But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I got a recall at RADA with a similar type of audition to what I did at Guildhall. And that’s how I can tell myself that it doesn’t matter that Guildhall didn’t give me a recall, because I know that I may well have done much better if I auditioned like that at another school. And as an aside to back this up, the Irish guy who was on the RADA foundation course didn’t get a recall either. I think both of us were better suited to RADA than we were to Guildhall. This isn’t to say, by the way, that I think Guildhall’s own method of doing things is “wrong” or anything like that. On the contrary, they have turned out some incredible actors. But they go a different route to reaching that end point of “good acting” than some other schools do, and I guess, ultimately, I’m just not very well suited to that particular route. They’re looking for an incredibly open, blank canvas upon which they can build whatever they like (I don’t mean a boring person, or a stupid person, or an unemotional person, I mean somebody who is willing to let go of everything and finds it easy to go in any direction that is required of them). This isn’t to say that other schools don’t like that as well. But I have spoken to somebody who was at LAMDA and he told me that they don’t have a “LAMDA product” or anything like that, and that they really try and use what people already have and nurture that, rather than trying to build something completely new.

I think this is why Guildhall doesn’t let people apply more than twice. This is not really something you can learn to do. You either have the tendency to completely be yourself in that moment, or you don’t. With other schools you can do things like practise your speeches more and work on building up your connection with your characters and things like that. With Guildhall you get two shots; the only reason they don’t limit it to one is that you might have an off-day on that first audition so they need a second one to be absolutely certain that they made the right decision. With the other schools, it’s possible to do a lot to improve your chances as each year goes by. With Guildhall, it’s much, much harder, as they’re looking for something more instinctive, so they save both you and the school the bother of seeing you try and almost certainly fail once more by limiting you to two attempts.

Now, I don’t know at what point this audition report turned into a dissertation but I think it’s probably happened now, so apologies for making you read so much but I hope that it was of some interest at least. I always did find it harder to pin down exactly what it is that makes Guildhall tick than I did with any other drama school.

Anyway.

On my way out of the building I bumped into the student who had gone into the audition room with me. He said hello and that he was sorry I didn’t get a recall, which was nice of him, and that he thought I had some “stellar pieces” and that I shouldn’t worry. That cheered me up a bit, and gave me renewed hope for my now increasingly important date with LAMDA the next day.

So at the end of all that, I left Guildhall for quite possibly my last time ever with a smile on my face, even if it wasn’t for quite the reasons I might have hoped I would.

P.S. I have now since done my LAMDA audition and am currently waiting for the result in the post. I'm about to go away for a couple of days but when I get back I will write the report for that audition (which was certainly an interesting one), hopefully before I get their reply so that I'm not influenced by the result in any way when I'm writing. Anyway, speak soon...