Auditions

I wasn't sure how many people were going to turn up to audition for the two parts that were available. 

Two ladies came to the read-through, and a third had said she was unable to make the read-through, but would be auditioning, so I knew that I would have a decent choice of female actors (known as "actresses" in the "business", I believe!) to choose from.

But we saw no male actors (aka "actors"!) at the read-through, and a mail-out for interested people was not as successful as we'd hoped.

On the night, however, we had five ladies and three men come along to audition.

We started off playing some fairly silly games (the human knot, primal scream and tag photograph), to get everyone moving, engaged, comfortable and warmed-up.

I'd given everyone notice of the audition pieces the week before.  Three monologues for each character, and one dialogue between both characters.  I left it up to the actors to decide which monologues to do, or if they wanted me to tell them which one to perform.

I won't go into huge detail about individual performances here, as that would be unfair to the people who didn't get cast.  Suffice to say that I was very impressed at the level of preparation that everyone put into their audition pieces and they all showed a great understanding of the characters and the thought processes which the characters were going through during the pieces.

Usually at an audition, there are a couple of people who are obviously unsuitable for the part and they don't change your mind when they read the lines.  But this time round I could easily have found a justifiable reason for casting any of the auditionees in their respective parts. 

That made it a very hard decision.

But in the end, I was able to cast Miranda (Jennifer Hampton) and Frederick (Mat Robinson) as they both managed to embody their versions of the characters more completely than the other candidates.

Now I've got my actors I have to firm up the rehearsal schedule and then in a month (actually, 3 weeks!) time we start rehearsing.