'Little Women' Audition

Candidate Declaration - I confirm that the attached portfolio is all my own work

 ‘Little Women’ is our end of year show, and I couldn’t be more excited to take part in it. I was determined as ever to get the main role in my last end of year show, and I was looking forward to leaning more about this play. This play is very different from anything we have done before, set in a whole different period of time, which was very exciting and should challenge me on my acting journey. So, to start we picked our roles after reading the script and doing some of my own research on the piece, I chose to audition for ‘Laurie’. The main male lead and the love interest of the girls. He was definitely the most interesting character for me and had a lot to him when you looked close enough. Once I had decided who to audition for, I looked at the script again and looked for any details that showed me more about what this character was like. I made sure to take note of any directions to look for any mannerisms he might have or that I could create myself. Moreover, I watched the Christian Bale version of the character followed by Timothy Chalamet. I liked both versions and got a good sense of the character. I didn’t want to go too much into their decisions on the character, as I wanted to create my own version for this audition. I looked at the characters background (especially in terms of the time period) and the things he did in between being seen in the piece, like when he went to Europe heartbroken, which was a big telling sign of what type of person he is. In summary a romantic and charming man with a soft side for ‘Jo’, that he cannot get rid of. Whilst he is this romantic character, he is also very kind and caring but also cheeky and can stretch the rules.

In the audition I had to perform a scene with ‘Jo’, our love interest. So, we needed to find another girl that was auditioning for ‘Jo’ and perform it with them. This was very important to get right as chemistry is everything in this play. We also had to write our own monologue as the character, this was actually quite fun as it allowed me a chance to step further into the characters mind and to understand him. I wrote my monologue to cover the time when he went to Europe heartbroken and was talking about what he wanted to do with his life. In the audition I did the duologue with Rebecca, and I thought it went really well. We had prepared for this, and I felt our chemistry was good, maybe not the best but me and Rebecca are good enough friends, so it worked. When we were asked questions about why we auditioned for these characters I felt confident, I knew him really well and I could answer anything. Looking back at my audition I feel like I could have tried to let go even more and just go with it, to be in love and act like it. I thought my monologues were good, I thought they gave a clear understanding that I knew the character and filled in the gaps we see in the play. However, I think I should have spent more time looking about how they write back in 1820’s for my own monologue.  

The next round of auditions were for chemistry reads, for ‘Jo’ I had Millie, and I was happy to work with her again, as she was my ‘Dorothy’ in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. We worked together in the morning to test out how we wanted to perform it on stage and how much we wanted to do to make this look like I was madly in love. Our audition went really well, I let go a lot more leading to a more believable story and scene. We were proud of it and in the moment we were happy. My next chemistry read was with the character ‘Amy’ and was performing it with Phoebe. Now Pheebs and I do not talk much, so we had never actually worked together, and we were also meant to be falling for each other. It was quite difficult at first to find the right way of talking to each other and exactly what to do. Nevertheless, when it came to performing it, we thought it went well. Again, it was all about just letting go, we may have never worked together before but that was only a small hurdle. The trick is all in the way you looked at your partner and how you have to feel in yourself, you almost have to trick yourself to thinking you’re actually in love with them. 

Overall, I had a great couple of days of fun and exploring the character. You can learn a lot from a character by just playing and exploring with yourself how you want to play them and working with other people to see how you bounce off each other and see what your create in that moment.