5 kinds of speeches to avoid for drama school auditions
I’ve sat on many audition panels for drama schools over a number of years. After a while you begin to see some things that really help to propel an applicant forward and some things that can hold them back. A big one in my book are the speech choices.
Lets be clear here, I don’t mean speeches should be catered and chosen by the audition panel’s taste - ‘if they don’t like my speech then I won’t get a place’. Thats far from the truth. There are plenty of speeches that are just not my kind of thing or have been done to death that I truly don’t mind seeing in an audition room. The reason being is that those speeches that I don’t ‘like’ serve a clear purpose and show off the best in an applicant because it’s written more or less into the writing.
There are speeches, on the other hand, that do applicants a disservice but this is based largely on the combination of applicant to the wrong speech for them. Its also based on the speech simply being no good for the purpose of an audition for drama school. It might be great on stage in front of a large audience but doesn’t translate well to the audition room.
Below are the few red flags that I see coming into audition rooms that make it incredibly difficult to see the applicant doing the best job they can actually do and aren’t giving the panel what they need to make an accurate assessment of talent.
no lived experience
For drama school auditions, especially on your contemporary speeches, we encourage applicants to choose speeches that have elements of their own lived experience or have a definite relatable quality for the applicant. Auditioning with speeches from plays is hard enough - you have no real audience, you don’t have the rest of the cast or costume or set or build up into the scene that you would normally have from a live performance. Everything is in isolation meaning that you have to jump all in and make an imaginative leap into the connection to the character and circumstance of the piece. This will be made doubly hard if what you are speaking about has no basis or bearing on what you understand about the world.
I see a lot of applicants coming in with speeches about serving in the armed forces, being a sex worker, owning a fortune 500 company, having 15 year marriages, having early onset dementia and a whole host of other things that the applicant has never ever experienced. Sure, they might have seen it on tv or in a film or might have a relative or friend who has had these experiences but their own understanding of the experience doesn’t match up.
Choose something close to you. Something that you can relate to. If you fear that by choosing something of your own experience could be potentially ‘boring’ or ‘not dramatic enough’ then that is simply not true. There are a ton of speeches about everyday things and musings about the world. They aren’t boring, they are simple and effective and above all - they will show you as being truthful. Thats the big thing. Stop reaching for something you can’t relate to and work on grounding an anchor of truth in a speech that is closer to you.
accent
You should always be auditioning in your own accent unless deliberately specified which is rare. Yet there are applicants that jump into different accents for speeches and this can be distracting and off-putting.
Panels want to know how you sound naturally. Once you’ve got a place at drama school you’ll have plenty of time to hone the skills in accent work and add as many dialects to you cv as you choose but for now, focus solely on your own accent.
Personally I love hearing Shakespeare in regional accents - it sounds amazing. It is equal to RP (received pronunciation) and should therefore not be changed out from the thinking that all classical text should be spoken like this. Give me a Welsh Iago, a Juliet from Cork or an Isabella from Toulouse any day!
Be proud of your accent, show it off, it is an asset that sets you apart from the other people auditioning that day. I’d encourage you to find speeches that are written by writers or plays set from where you are from. They often have colloquialisms, jargon and a general energy that suits the way you speak and can often have subject matter that you both understand, can relate to and have experienced. Do some research and see what you can find.
A word about speeches that have jargon, colloquialisms and sayings that are meant for a different accent. For example - ‘driving down the highway in a catalac eating twinkies on the way to San Diego’. If your natural accent doesn’t align with the American language then it can be quite jarring. In this situation I would encourage you to seek a different speech.
unnecessary props
Don’t get me wrong. I love a prop. HOWEVER, an audition room isn’t the place to have them. If a speech requires you to knock on a door, dial a phone, do your makeup etc then I would encourage you to either find a way to cut that section out or choose a different speech. These props are unnecessary and can distract from you in the moment. They often lead to you having to do some cringy miming which never works out well.
Of course if the prop is really simple and absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt 100% necessary then go for it. But ONLY if the speech is an absolute winner and the prop is small, appears briefly and will NOT under any circumstances distract from your performance.
You want the focus to be entirely on you and not on the bells and whistles that surround the speech.
This extends to costume as well. You don’t need scarves, hats, coats, sunglasses, army combats etc in order to do the speech.
If the speech relies heavily on props and costume then I would challenge you to think whether that is a strong speech in the first place.
too much needed context
‘Jimmy was upset because Chloe was all up in his face about last Friday down the Greyhound with the rest of the team. All Jake could talk about was how much time his old man was getting knowing full well the judge was drunk during sentencing because the gazette had been writing about it for weeks’
Confused? Too many people? Too many potential places and circumstances? No idea what’s going on? You’re not the only one.
If a panel was confronted with this they would spend most of your precious audition time trying to figure it out instead of paying total attention to how good you are!
For the purpose of drama school auditions, you want to keep your context as simple as possible to give the panel the best chance of following the story so they can simply analyse how you are as an Actor.
It could be the most amazing speech in the world but if I need to see the play, read the synopsis and have a big discussion about what’s going on just to understand it then it isn’t suitable for auditioning with.
too long
Drama schools these days are asking that you don’t exceed 2 minutes in length for each speech with many schools actually requesting 1.5 minutes.
1.5 minutes is actually a perfect length. It gives the panel a good amount of time to access where you’re at in terms of capability and decide what they would like to do in redirection. Its also beneficial to you, the applicant, because it means you don’t have to memorise what feels like half a play!
Yet so often applicants come in with speeches that are way too long. And I mean WAY too long. Like 3/4 minutes. Nobody needs that amount of speech! You run the risk of forcing your panel to stop you mid speech for no other reason but that they are on a time budget.
Time your pieces! I don’t mean rattle through the speech at lightning speed to get all of the words into 1.5 minutes. Take your time and perform the speech as you would when you’re in an audition room. This will be an accurate gauge of how long it is. It should have breath and opportunity for pause if needed. If its still too long when you time it, cut out a few unnessesray or repeated words and lines. Slim it down bit by bit so that you don’t loose the heart of the speech but still keep it to a healthy 1.5 minutes.