According to one of my favourite websites, dictionary.com, the number one definition for the word ‘audition’ is this: ‘a trial hearing given to a singer, actor, or other performer to test suitability for employment, professional training or competition, etc’. Perhaps definition number two could then read: ‘a ritual humiliation given to a singer, actor or other performer to test gullibility for employment, professional training or competition, etc.’
Ask any actor what they feel is the least enjoyable aspect of their job and without hesitation they will say the auditioning (the penury may also score highly but that’s another feature). For me, the least painful auditions have been those that work much like ripping off a plaster; get it over and done with as soon as possible (and hope the dried bloody scab won’t look to bad).
There are some auditions, of course, which could be classed as almost being on the right side of painful. Well, kind of like the right-side-of-root-canal-surgery-painful. And if you don’t get the part, it’s just a quick phone call, email or neither of these and only a pleasant stony silence to let you know that you’re rubbish. I mean, not quite right/what we’re looking for/rubbish.
Yet there are those auditions which are what I like to call ‘the friendly death row trials’ otherwise known as group workshop auditions. On paper these seem like great fun; lock approximately 25 actors in a room, ask them to do a bit of improvisation and then perform selected script scenes to the rest of the group. Hey, that’s fun! What’s not fun about any of that? Nothing. The not-fun bit is this: knowing that there will be a cull and that some, maybe even just one person, will not be asked to return after lunch.
In no other profession, in so far as I’m aware, does this happen. You do not ask twenty odd cleaners to perform mopping, dusting and scrubbing in front of other cleaners and then read out a list of those who are allowed to come back after the lunch break and those who should go home, shamefully carrying their mop buckets between their legs. You do not ask a large group of accountants to calculate sums in front of one another and then select who gets to stay to add up more sums and who gets to go, their abacus heads hanging low as they skulk past the chosen few (N.B: If this does happen in either the cleaning or the accountancy professions, that utterly sucks too).
I have been in both situations – asked to stay and, well, my name not being on the list that has just been read out, asked to infer that I am to go. Both situations are equally unpleasant (I fantasize about what would happen if I suddenly wailed, “No! I’m coming back after lunch to do my monologue, dammit!”).
But even after the auditions in which I have been successful I still vow that I will never do one of these death row workshops again (much like I vow never to eat blue cheese again), I realize that auditioning is a necessary evil but does it have to involve such cold culling? Can’t there be more humane ways? My cranium’s in the cumulus I know, but maybe I could write to dictionary.com and ask them to change their number one definition for ‘audition’ to something like this: a trial hearing where everyone is invited to come back after lunch.
Marie Louise Cookson is a writer and actor, and thinks Amy Poehler should be made a Dame. Marie’s alter ego, Mitzy, blogs HERE and dispenses words of wisdom via twitter @wellfanmybrow
Pictured: auditions, vintage style, Marie Louise Cookson
