In the 2004 school nativity, I played the fat dormouse. I’d love to say this was my segue into the world of drama but, alas, it was the start of several niche chorus animal roles that petered out as I reached adolescence. I never had a big list of extracurriculars – I was an odd kid with a few close friends who sat inside at lunchtime solving Rubix cubes. My family always thought I was theatrical, but at school I was a more meek creature, much like the fat dormouse I chose to embody.
I mentally played with the idea of auditions when I got to uni, but I hadn’t ‘learned’ how to act. I knew how to balance chemical equations and what a cat’s penis looked like. I didn’t have southern vowels, I didn’t know what physical theatre was and I’d only heard of two plays. I felt under-qualified. I was busy. I did science. I didn’t have time for theatre and even if I did, I wasn’t the sort. These people were a world away from me and they would laugh me out of the audition room.
It took me three years to realise what nonsense this was. You don’t get roles you don’t audition for and 18 year old Emma could have done with this knowledge to help her escape her self-fulfilling prophecy. In my third year I had less work and decided I was going to try something new. I remember that first gig very well. Probably because, to this day, it was the worst of my life. My material was well polished and I knew it by heart and I’ve taken much weaker more experimental stuff to the stage since. The problem is, nobody heard it because it was a beer festival. Everyone was drunk, some people were throwing things at me and my legs felt like jelly. Aided by the free Heineken, I soldiered through, my best friend sat in the front row, and laughing her head off. That became the set that I did again and again, that launched me on to the scene in our town.
Since then, I’ve been in more shows than I can list and auditioned for even more. I know I will get rejected from some of them, because thats life, but it’s not because I’m the wrong sort of person. Of my friends from theatre and comedy, I can’t tell you where or when they started performing, I just know we are all on the same stage. Now I’m in clinical school, it’s a juggle. There are gigs I can’t do because I have to be on a rotation the next morning and auditions I miss because of my lecture timetable.
I know for a fact that I’ve had more fun and improved myself more than I could have done curled up in my safe bubble of things I thought myself qualified for.
