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Hi,

This may have been asked before, but anyway here goes.

Ds is going to be doing his AS and A2s in one year as he missed AS due to a filming commitment. He wants to apply for drama school entry for September 2013. He's worried he will be too busy with his studies to do his monologues justice. Can anyone suggest the best way to approach this, ie when to apply and when to aim to get auditions. Also he is not doing drama at A level. Is it a good idea to get some coaching on the monologues?

Thanks

I think the most important thing is DON'T apply till your monologues are 100% ready. For some places you have to wait ages for an audition, others can be very quick! You have to be very confident with your monologues, as re-direction is common - sometimes quite radically. Also take time to choose your pieces, checking requirements for each college. We had a harrowing experience the night before one audition when DD looked again at info and realised her ist choice piece was not OK as it said "British" play (hers was american). So I suppose another tip is read, read and read again all the info of what the college wants. They are all infuriatingly different! It pays to have more choices than needed (see above!!!). You also need to know about the play, writer etc not just know the piece.

I think it is always good to have someone to work through monologues with - need not be a teacher but helps if they are familiar with drama school auditions. I think it gives you more confidence if you have done this.

Many Acting (not just MT) will also require a song (esp in later rounds) so you need to prepare for this as well.

As for when to apply, I would not apply too early (see first paragraph) but too late and many places may already have been allocated. However, if the college is part of UCAS there is less flexibility.

Hope some of this helps! Good luck

It IS really hard work juggling A levels and drama school auditions. I would agree with Welshmum not to apply too early. DD sent off most of her applications at the end of October and was offered auditions for most schools before Christmas. She auditioned for BOVTS in early Novemeber and that didn't go well as she really wasn't ready. Fortunately due to a filming commitment, she has to rearrange the other auditions for Spring by which time she had got her A2 coursework out of the way and had had much more time to prepare. She found a really good mentor locally - a young actor much like SonofPG and worked with him on a weekly basis. He really helped her work on her monologues and be ready for likely audition scenarios - redirection, pretending to be custard and all the other strange things they make you do! DD spent a day or two with him really going over all the different audition requirements in order to come up with the absolute minimum number of monologues to tick all the different boxes for all the different schools!

If she was doing it again this year, with the benefit of hindsight, I would say start preparing like mad now but don't actually apply until December or even after Christmas if he has a lot of January exam modules so he can get them out of the way first. Hope this helps and good luck to him! It's a stressful process but he will learn a lot from it! Keep us posted

Thanks - I will keep you posted!!!