ABSTRACT
As with everything in our business, working in theatre has become much more competitive over the years. Many years ago, when I was a young actor, I heard an old actor reminiscing about his father’s experiences when he was an actor in the 1920s. He said that his father would come home to London on a Sunday morning, after finishing a play in an out of town repertory theatre the night before. On the Monday morning, he would go into central London and take a walk down Shaftesbury Avenue – as it was customary for actors who were out of work to do – and would invariably bump into a fellow actor, who would ask if he was looking for a job. When he replied that he was, his friend would tell him that the director at a certain theatre was looking for an actor, so he would go to the stage door and ask for an audition. He would be led to the stage, do his audition pieces and either leave with the promise of a job or be asked to start there and then. This concept sounded blissful to me and I was amazed how
easy finding work seemed in those days. That said, the profession itself was a lot smaller back then – Spotlight consisted of just a single volume (containing both actors and actresses) as opposed to the current ten (five each for actors and actresses), as well as numerous other specialist directories – and the stigma attached to being an actor (it was not considered a respectable profession) kept lots of wannabes from attempting to break in. Times have changed radically; the pressure of numbers makes competition for jobs much fiercer, so we need to polish our audition skills to succeed in today’s more crowded marketplace.
