When I was a student at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, I would often sit in on auditions for prospective students. I would watch dozens of young actors perform their speeches, and would see the same simple mistakes that talented people made when approaching their monologues.
In this article, I'll offer five techniques you can use when preparing your speeches that will bring colour and atmosphere to your pieces while providing solid textual analysis you can fall back on if you're feeling stuck or unsure how to get started.
The Pressure of Drama School Auditions
Drama school auditions are incredibly stressful. You're transitioning from enjoying drama in school or after-school classes to considering it as a career. These big institutions are often not very transparent about what they're looking for. You're timed for your pieces, there's the significant cost of auditioning, and all of that creates enormous pressure.
But here's one of the main pieces of advice I want to offer before we dive into the technical work:
The difference between amateur actors and professional actors is this: Amateurs try to feel what the character is feeling or going through. Professionals channel what a character is feeling or thinking so the audience can feel something from it.
Let me explain what I mean. All too often, I'd sit in the audition room while drama school applicants would force themselves to go through an emotion like sadness and push out tears. It was all too insular, guarded, and. to be brutally honest, not very interesting to watch.
A professional actor will be open to how the scene and external circumstances affect them, using this to guide their intentions and display how the character thinks and feels. It's not interesting to watch an actor try to force emotions for themselves. It's far more compelling to see something familiar or real in an actor's performance that makes us, the audience, feel or think something about ourselves.
This is one of the main things you'll learn at any drama school, so it's good to keep in mind from the start.
Over-Rehearsed Monolouges
This brings me to my next point: so many applicants would enter the room incredibly well-prepared, knowing their speeches inside out, but their monologues had become mechanical and stale.
I get it, you want to be as prepared as possible. Knowing your lines and understanding the scene is the absolute minimum. However, it's not good to do this at the cost of keeping the monologue alive and free.
A monologue is a tough thing to do. After drama school, you'll hardly ever be asked to perform one unless you're in a play. What I'm going to offer are five techniques you can employ when preparing your monologues that will prevent them from becoming over-rehearsed and stale, while keeping them open to new direction and making sure you feel totally prepared for any direction that may be thrown at you in your audition.
These techniques are all based on Stanislavski methods that you'll learn in your first year of drama school. The aim is to mix textual work with play and exercises to get the most out of your speeches.
1. Character Analysis: Know Who You're Playing
This is the first piece of textual analysis you should do, get to know your character inside and out.
Start by making a comprehensive list of everything that's said about your character:
What's in the stage directions about your character? What do other characters say about you? What does your character say about themselves?
For example, if you're performing Hamlet, note that he's just returned from university, his father has recently died, his mother has remarried his uncle within months. Claudius says Hamlet is mourning excessively. Ophelia says he's behaved strangely toward her. Hamlet himself claims he has "that within which passeth show."
Or, let's take Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. The stage directions tell us she's thirteen years old. Her mother says she's of an age to marry. The Nurse describes her childhood. Juliet herself reveals she's obedient but also passionate and capable of defiance.
When you've finished, you should have a substantial list about your character that will aid your characterization. Make sure not to infer too much stick to the facts and avoid opinions unless the character says it about themselves.
Create smaller lists for the other characters in the play, what are their characteristics, and how do they relate to you? What are your relationships and connections?
When this is all finished, create a character biography with all the information you've mined. It will take multiple read-throughs of the play to do this properly, and it will help immerse you into the world of the character.
Once done, you can do physical exercises to embody the character, such as character etudes - little snapshots of the character's life based on the information you've discovered.
2. External Circumstances: The World Before the Play
External circumstances are all the circumstances that occur before the play even starts. You want to scan the text for nuggets of information about the world your character inhabits.
Let's use The Seagull by Chekhov as an example. The basics would start like this: It's Russia. It's 1895. It's summer on a country estate. Again, stick to the facts.
With this information, you should research: What was life in Russia in 1895 like? What was happening socially and politically? How did the decline of the aristocracy affect people's lives and relationships? This research will add colour and depth to your performance.
For A Streetcar Named Desire, external circumstances include: It's New Orleans, 1947. It's post-World War II America. Blanche comes from a declining Southern aristocratic family. Stanley is working-class. The city is hot, cramped.
Understanding these external circumstances informs everything about how your character moves, speaks, and relates to their world.
3. Immediate Circumstances: What Just Happened
Immediate circumstances are things that have happened within 24 hours or less before your scene. As you're performing from a play, it's crucial to know what state the character is in before each scene.
This is equally important for your audition speech because it may inform specific things you can bring into your performance.
For example, if you're performing Brutus's speech from Julius Caesar, the immediate circumstances are: The mob has just killed Caesar moments ago. The crowd is volatile and dangerous. Brutus needs to justify the assassination immediately or face their wrath.
For Blanche's "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" moment in A Streetcar Named Desire, the immediate circumstances are: She's just been assaulted by Stanley. Stella has betrayed her by not believing her. She's being taken to a mental institution. Her entire constructed reality has collapsed.
These immediate circumstances fundamentally change how you enter the scene and what emotional state you're carrying.
4. Events and Intentions: What Changes and What You Want
Events are things that happen in the scene that change your character's intention, no matter how big or small.
A character entering or exiting a scene is always an event. A gun being fired would be an event. Brutus stabbing Caesar is an event. These are all things that shift your character's intention.
When performing a monologue, you're not playing off other characters, so you need to identify the emotional beats of the speech as events. The character begins to tell a story, that's an event. They reflect on a memory, that's another event. Use these shifts to change your character's intention organically.
Intentions are what your character wants, what they're trying to achieve.
As mentioned, they're governed by the events that occur, but the intention is the personal desire of the character. What are they trying to do? In monologue form, you're alone on stage, but your character still wants something, otherwise, they wouldn't be speaking.
Treat the audition panel like your audience. A monologue is often a character trying to win the favor of the audience in some way, so use them. Convince them, manipulate them, seduce them, shock them.
For example, in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, when John Proctor delivers his confession speech, his intention is to maintain his integrity and his name, even at the cost of his life. He's trying to convince the judges (and himself) that he won't sign a false confession. Every beat of that speech works toward that intention.
Use your intentions to tell your story, win your argument. The speech is an argument; your intention is how you win it.
5. Time and Place: Adding Atmosphere
This is something that's rarely done, even in professional theatre, but it's one of my favourite techniques. Employing specific time and place will add new dimensions and atmosphere to your performance. It's particularly useful if your speech is starting to feel over-rehearsed or mechanical.
Where are you?
Hamlet delivers "To be or not to be" in Elsinore Castle, likely in a corridor or chamber where he thinks he's alone (though Polonius and Claudius are hiding). How does being in his uncle's house, the place where his father was murdered, inform the speech? Does that make you quieter, more paranoid, more contained? Perhaps there are points you would want Claudius to hear you?
Or take Viola's "I left no ring with her" speech from Twelfth Night. She's in Orsino's palace, disguised as a man, having just realized Olivia has fallen for her male persona. Being in a place where she must maintain her disguise fundamentally affects how freely she can express herself.
What time is it?
How you speak at 3pm in the stands of a sports match is vastly different from 7am in a library. Often the text won't tell you this explicitly, so you need to make an informed choice based on all the information you've gathered from examining the text.
Is it early morning when everyone's asleep? Late at night when you're exhausted? Midday when the heat is oppressive? These choices affect energy, volume, pacing, and the overall atmosphere of your piece.
Bringing It All Together
Deploy these five techniques, and you'll know the play and your character better than most people walking into that audition room. More importantly, you'll have a toolbox to fall back on when nerves hit or when you're given unexpected direction.
The person you are is a thousand times more interesting than the best actor you could ever hope to be.
The panel might ask you to try the speech differently, maybe faster, quieter, or with a different intention. If you've done this work, you can adapt instantly because you understand the mechanics of what you're doing, not just a memorized performance.
Authenticity is the most compelling thing to watch. Remember to be yourself and go for it. The audition panel isn't looking for perfection, they're looking for potential, for someone who's done the work, and for someone they'd want to spend three years training.
Drama school is just the beginning of your journey. Show them you're ready to learn, that you understand the fundamentals of textual analysis, and that you can bring yourself honestly to the work. That's what will make you stand out in a room full of talented people all competing for the same spots.
Good luck. You've got this.