Classical Monologues for Women Read online

  The Good Audition Guides

  CLASSICAL MONOLOGUES FOR WOMEN

  edited and introduced by

  MARINA CALDARONE

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CLASSICAL GREEK AND ROMAN

  Electra

  from Electra by Sophocles (c. 415 BC)

  Polyxena

  from Hecuba by Euripides (c. 424 BC)

  Creusa

  from Ion by Euripides (c. 413 BC)

  Ismene

  from Thebans by Liz Lochhead (2003),

  after Sophocles and Euripides (5th century BC)

  Palaestra

  from Rudens by Plautus (c. 200 BC)

  ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN

  Alice Arden

  from Arden of Faversham by Anon (1592)

  Margaret of Anjou

  from Henry VI, Part 3 by William Shakespeare (1592)

  Countess of Salisbury

  from Edward III by William Shakespeare (1593)

  Julia

  from The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William

  Shakespeare (1593)

  Lady Anne

  from Richard III by William Shakespeare (1594)

  Adriana

  from The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

  (1595)

  Lady Constance

  from King John by William Shakespeare (1596)

  Tamyra

  from Bussy D’Ambois by George Chapman (1604)

  Bellafront

  from The Honest Whore by Thomas Dekker (1604)

  Beatrice

  from The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston (1604)

  Crispinella

  from The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston (1604)

  Mother

  from A Mad World, My Masters

  by Thomas Middleton (1605)

  Lucretia Borgia

  from The Devil’s Charter by Barnabe Barnes (1607)

  Hermione

  from The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare (1610)

  Maria

  from The Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher (1611)

  Guiomar

  from The Custom of the Country by John Fletcher (1619)

  Hippolyta

  from The Custom of the Country by John Fletcher (1619)

  Beatrice

  from The Changeling

  by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (1622)

  Leonora

  from The Devil’s Law-Case by John Webster (1623)

  Lady Alworth

  from A New Way to Pay Old Debts

  by Philip Massinger (1625)

  FRENCH AND SPANISH GOLDEN AGE

  Casilda

  from Peribanez by Lope de Vega (c. 1605-12)

  Célimène

  from The Misanthrope by Molière (1666)

  Henriette

  from The Learned Ladies by Molière (1672)

  Phedra

  from Phedra by Jean Racine (1677)

  RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  Margery

  from The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1675)

  Charlotte

  from She Ventures, and He Wins by Ariadne (1695)

  Bassima

  from The Royal Mischief by Delariviere Manley (1696)

  Lamira

  from The Fatal Friendship by Catherine Trotter (1698)

  Jane

  from The Tragedy of Jane Shore by Nicholas Rowe (1714)

  Millwood

  from The London Merchant by George Lillo (1731)

  Miss Stirling

  from The Clandestine Marriage

  by David Garrick/George Coleman (1766)

  Lydia Languish

  from The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1775)

  Julia

  from The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1775)

  Mrs Dangle

  from The Critic by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1779)

  NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES

  Mrs Tiffany

  from Fashion, or Life in New York

  by Anna Cora Mowatt (1845)

  Mrs Alving

  from Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (1881)

  Miss Julie

  from Miss Julie by August Strindberg (1888)

  Madame X

  from The Stronger by August Strindberg (1889)

  Jean

  from Alan’s Wife

  by Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins (1893)

  Mrs Cheveley

  from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895)

  Yelena

  from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (1897)

  Alice

  from The Dance of Death, Part Two

  by August Strindberg (1901)

  Margaret

  from Fanny’s First Play by George Bernard Shaw (1911)

  Orinthia

  from The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw (1929)

  Bride

  from Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca (1933)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Introduction

  AN OPPORTUNITY, NOT A TEST

  Let’s assume you have an audition coming up. It may be for entrance to drama school, or for your first job after training, or it could be twenty years into your career and you have been asked to show your suitability for a specific role. Whatever the circumstances, the stakes are always high, and the somewhat artificial situation is undeniably nerve-racking. You want to find a monologue that does two jobs at once: it suits your particular skills and it demonstrates your particular suitability for the job you are interviewing for.

  Before you begin, it is worth remembering that the person or panel auditioning you is just as anxious . . . for you. They will want to put you at your ease, get the very best out of you, and enable you to enjoy the experience – so that they do as well. Adrenaline can be a useful energising factor, but the most valuable qualities when going into an audition are sound prepa ration and an ability to flex that most crucial of actors’ muscles: the imagination. Dare to make brave choices in the selection and delivery of your audition piece, and you will always stand out. View your audition as an opportunity, not a test.

  USING THIS BOOK

  The fifty speeches in this volume offer a new selection of classical monologues, divided into five distinct time periods from Ancient Greece to the 1930s. It is not an anthology of ‘great speeches from dramatic literature’ but, rather, a miscellany of eclectic and original monologues. Many will prove challenging; some will seem immediately unsuitable for you; others will lead you down stimulating new avenues you hadn’t considered before. Most of the monologues are taken in their entirety from plays; others have been shaped and moulded from a series of separate but closely connected passages to form a coherent speech.

  The monologues are arranged in chronological order, within the five time periods: Classical Greek and Roman, Elizabethan and Jacobean, French and Spanish Golden Age, Restoration and Eighteenth Century, and Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Before each section is a short introduction to the respective period, plus some pointers that may prove interesting or useful. By and large, however, the same ‘rules’ for preparing your monologue apply for all time periods – whether you are delivering Ancient Greek rhetoric, Renaissance tragic verse or savage Wildean wit.

  Preceding each individual monologue is a checklist of the basic information you need to know before you can begin work: Who is speaking; Where; To whom and When the character is speaking; What has just happened in the play to provoke the speech; What the character wants and some possible ob
jectives to play. After many of the speeches is a glossary explaining less familiar words and phrases.

  This checklist isn’t a substitute for reading the play from which the monologue is taken. Nor is it offered as a comprehensive guide or direction on how to rehearse and present the speech. It’s a starting point, a springboard, from which you need to start making your own choices, in order to achieve ownership of the monologue and your performance of it.

  The important thing is to keep your performance real and truthful. Many people put too much emphasis on the notion of ‘classical’ text being very different and very much harder than ‘contemporary’ text. Yes, classical text is harder insofar as the language can be less familiar, the syntax trickier, the form less comfortable – but the heart of the work is exactly the same, albeit sometimes bigger. During the act of transformation, you will need to grow emotionally, linguistically, physically in order to speak these lines; the character remains a person inhabiting a real world – not a ‘classical’ one frozen in the past!

  CHOOSING YOUR MONOLOGUE

  There are many books written on how to audition, numerous classes to take in perfecting your audition technique, and it can be easy to forget that the first, and possibly the most important, stage in the process is making your initial choice of audition material.

  •

  You must choose a piece that plays to your personal strengths as an actor; something you know you can understand, can work with, and is within your capabilities as a performer. At the same time, you should be looking to challenge yourself and not confine yourself to any mould. Be brave!

  •

  The speech has to ‘speak’ to you. You must respond to the text instinctively on some level before you can begin to take it apart. Read different speeches out loud. If you only consider a monologue from an intellectual point of view, there is a limit to what will present itself to you, but in the actual speaking of the words you will taste unexpected nuances. The power of great writing is that you can experience it on an entirely physical level as you swill the text around in your mouth.

  •

  If you are auditioning for a specific role, you must choose one that resonates with or reflects at some level the part you are being seen for. Is it a tragic or comic piece you are auditioning for? What ‘weight’ is required for the role? Make a judgement and find a monologue that mirrors this dynamic. Is the character emotionally centred, forwardly energetic, or laid-back and relaxed?

  •

  If you are auditioning for a role in a period piece, it makes sense to choose a monologue that is set in the same time period, since you will often be assessed on your ability to speak the language of that period in both a natural and an accurate way.

  •

  Choose a speech that you are excited by, will enjoy working on, and which resonates with you as a performer and as a person. Stay instinctive.

  PREPARING YOUR MONOLOGUE

  So you’ve chosen your speech and now need to prepare it for your audition. Here are some of the things you certainly should be doing, some things you might be considering, and some you should definitely be avoiding.

  •

  Always read the play that the monologue is taken from. If you don’t, you’re hunting for buried treasure without thinking to consult the map. Find out what else the playwright has written, and what identifies the period specifically. This will help you form a context for the monologue and your playing of it, but also give you something to discuss with those auditioning you. An intellectually engaged actor is always an appealing one.

  •

  Find the impulse to start the monologue. Each of the speeches in this volume appears with some suggested objectives as a starting point for you. There must always be a reason for the character to open their mouth, to start talking; there must be something they want. A common analogy used is this: If you dive off the diving board in the correct way, you will have a perfect flow through the air and will enter the water effortlessly. Similarly, in an audition, if you don’t take a moment to clarify who you are and what you want before diving in, you’ll belly flop!

  •

  Once you have your objective/s, one useful way to proceed is to ‘action’ the speech. Instead of concentrating on acting moods and emotions, you find an active, transitive verb to play on each and every line or objective that helps you achieve your aim. (Actions – The Actors’ Thesaurus, which I compiled with the actress Maggie Lloyd-Williams, offers an explanation of this widely-used system, and a thesaurus of Actioning words.)

  •

  Consider who the speech is spoken to. It is too off-putting to look directly at the audition panel, so where will you place the person/s you are addressing. Will they move during the speech? Will you ‘stage’ the piece with movement and gestures, or will you remain static? All the choices you make are crucial in demonstrating your ability to inhabit a role totally.

  •

  The language and syntax of the speech will tell you everything you need to know about the character. We are how we speak, and what we say. Look carefully at the choices the playwright has made concerning vocabulary, form and punctuation. A comma is not a full stop; a full stop is not an exclamation mark: they mean completely different things. What does it mean if a character talks rapidly, in short sentences, haltingly, and frequently punctuated, as opposed to one who talks at greater length in a much more florid sentence with rarely a punctuation mark intruding on the text? Be precise in your reading of these instructions, and follow them. Inhabit the character by allowing the text itself to lead your delivery, your breathing, your tempo. It is too often the case, when I am on an auditioning panel, that when I refer to the text of the speech that the actor in front of me is performing, I see that all the punctuation has been ignored in favour of another, generally easier, way of playing it.

  •

  If you are being considered for a role where the character speaks mostly in verse, it would be wise to choose a monologue in verse, and show some working knowledge of how to speak it. The character expresses him or herself in verse for a reason. It’s a heightened form, used when prose is not enough to convey their elevated thoughts and feelings. In a musical, a character breaks into song when spoken words are not enough. In drama, verse occurs where prose is not enough. It says a lot about a character when they move from prose to verse within a scene – or even a single speech – and vice versa. Understand and enjoy the change.

  •

  Many of the monologues in this volume are written in iambic pentameter, the most common verse form of the Renaissance theatre. Feel your pulse now or imagine an amplified heartbeat, the short beat followed by the long – the heart pumping blood around your body does so with the rhythm of an iamb. So an iambic pentameter consists of a short beat, and then a long one, five times a line. Dedum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum. Be careful though: much verse in iambic pentameter doesn’t conform rigidly to this pattern. In such cases, don’t compress the beats into too regular a five-beat rhythm. The variations are important and intentional, and irregularity can reflect the character’s state of mind.

  •

  Classical text must not sound ‘classical’, it’s in the present tense and active, and should sound as if you are speaking it today. We’ve all heard actors using a false, declamatory voice when performing Shakespeare. Avoid this at all costs in auditions. It is phoney and indicates an actor’s ignorance of what the character is actually saying. Speak with immediacy, vitality and truth, and it will be (electrifyingly) powerful.

  •

  The effort you put into preparing your monologue will be commensurate with the effortlessness it will appear to have in the playing. The French for ‘to rehearse’ is ‘répéter’. You won’t go far wrong repeating and repeating your monologue, trying something different each time, keeping what you like, what ‘fits’, and letting go what doesn’t. It is quite simple: the more fully prepared you are, the more confident you will be; the more confident you are, the mor
e risks you will take, and the more you will ‘let go’ and be able to respond to any re-direction offered to you.

  •

  However, don’t overwork and overanalyse the monologue and your performance of it to the point where it becomes unnatural or forced. Ensure that all your choices are sound, based on taking appropriate time to investigate and rehearse.

  PREPARING FOR YOUR AUDITION

  •

  As well as reading the play from which the monologue is taken, you should also read and research the play and the role you are auditioning for.

  •

  Be mindful of the time limit of any speeches you are to present; two minutes is the average length for most auditions. Many of the speeches in this volume will last longer than this, but are offered here in full so you can make your own choices about which passages to play and which to cut.

  •

  Look online for up-to-date information about those who are auditioning you. It may be that you have seen their work, which might help build a picture of what their tastes are, and give you something to talk about.

  •

  You are your own marketing manager. Have good, professional photographs taken and then ensure that the photograph you submit captures you – not just that it looks like you, but that it captures your spirit and personality energetically. Your agent and your friends can advise you on which photos do you justice. You will lose audition opportunities otherwise, and waste the auditions you are invited to.

  IN THE AUDITION

  •

  Wear something that the audition panel might remember you by – just wearing black is dangerous. After a day of seeing dozens of people, all of a specific physical type, it can be difficult to remember individual faces, appearances – and performances. At the same time, always dress appropriately for the part you are being considered for.

  •

  Be in good time. A perennially late actor is a perennially unemployed one.

  •

  Be open and positive, polite and friendly; say ‘Yes’ in your demeanour. That said, neediness is unattractive. Be enthusiastic but not desperate. It can be a fine line.