The Real Lessons of Drama School

Drama school. What a waste of time, eh? Singing, dancing and prancing around pretending you’ve got a glittering career ahead of you. Surely it’s just three years preparing yourself for a life on the dole, right? Wrong.

With it’s dizzying array of classes and subjects, drama school can seem like a very expensive way to become proficient at jazz hands but all those subjects can genuinely help you in the real world…

Singing…

Ever wanted a tube carriage that’s exclusive to you and your little gaggle of actor friends? All you need is a good song to sing in the round and with just one turn at ‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Red’ you’ll have ordinary, hard-working people risking life and limb to get themselves on to another carriage. Ah, a seat all the way to Cockfosters... 

Dance…

You might think that the dance that you learn at drama school will make you a hit down at the local disco. And maybe it will if the kids at Infernos are impressed by the same 4 moves repeated for the entirety of Orinoco Flow. But what will eventually stop their taunts and jibes is when you’re stuck in the queue for the toilets. While they’re miserably hopping from one foot to the other looking like amateurs, you can style out that wee-dance like the beautiful lovechild of Wayne Sleep and Michael Flatley that you are.

Improvisation…

Keith Johnstone, author of the book ‘Impro’ which will you'll see an unfinished copy of in every actor's bookcase, said:

“Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made – which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.”

Quite. And that’s why improvisation is such a useful tool. There’s no way you’re going to do well as an actor if you deny any knowledge of Microsoft Excel in your temp agency interview. Say yes to EVERYTHING. Fax machines, accounting programmes, open heart surgery...anything so you can stop living off the random selection of cold meats and drying quiches in Tesco’s discount fridge. You can worry about the dead bodies and confusing spreadsheets later. 

Voice…

Vocal support is incredibly important. And no, not because the meanies at the National Theatre won’t let you have a mic. But because how else will you let the rest of the bus know that someone once told you that your portral of Sally Bowles was better than Liza’s? I said “BETTER THAN LIZA’S.” If you don’t allow that to resonate through the whole bus (both floors) then no one will realise just how important you are. And you never know, there might be someone very influential listening in like Trevor Nunn or the recruitment officer for Asda.

Animal Studies…

Tutors can spend as long as they want telling you that Animal Studies is important for character development. It’s not. However, what it is useful for is having a story that’ll instantly make someone else feel better about their life. Friend just been dumped? Sibling lost their job? Their woes will be instantly alleviated when you tell them about the time you were chased around a dance studio while you lumbered about pretending to be a pig.

Accents…

Because you never know when you might be asked to fill in for Aiden Gillen on Game of Thrones…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHIykid21j4 (contains spoilers,)

Alexander Technique…

You might think that lying semi-supine in a studio can’t teach you anything. However, this class will teach you the invaluable gift of sleeping while you pretend you’re doing something incredibly important. If anything, Alexander Technique sums up your whole life as an actor.

Movement…

You may not still fully understand the point of Laban and your physical interpretation of the sound of running water may have been reminiscent of a skittish cat but I defy anyone to beat you at Charades from now on. And what better way to show your family that you’ve finally made it then successfully miming Saved By The Bell to your cousin this Christmas?

Acting…

Don't worry, you won’t be needing that.

Lessons

Today the world decided it was time to teach me a lesson. It was a harsh lesson to learn as I slowly woke up on a Sunday morning. As I debated whether I could really be bothered to make the two minute journey to the shop to buy eggs or if I should see if I could cobble together a breakfast out of Wispa bars and ground cumin, the world gave me a big ol' clip round the ear.

Y'see, I wasn't being offered a job yesterday. I was merely, in a roundabout way, being asked if I wanted to audition for the part. However, just because I've been asked to do one job without applying for it, my brain now instantly jumps to conclusions and presumes the whole world is desperate for a piece of Miss L. To be fair though, I think this sentence is pretty ambiguous...

I am looking for actresses and I was wondering whether you would be interested in working with me.


The rest of the email then goes into the filming dates and payment (or lack of) and says nothing about when auditions are or whether I'd be available for them. As I wondered which room to extend to house my hugely inflated ego, I assumed that this meant that they had looked at every other actress out there and decided that they couldn't possibly imagine anyone else playing the part. But of course, the world doesn't work like that. Instead, it lets you think for just a few seconds that maybe you've hauled yourself up to the next rung on the ladder. It lets you wobble about until you just get used to your new, slightly elevated position and then it sends a snake along to drag you all the way back down again.

I've always had a fear, especially with better jobs, that I've got the wrong end of an incredibly long and complicated stick. It probably doesn't say much about my self-esteem but I do often think that I'll turn up on set and no one will know why I'm there. There will then be a frantic look through lots of paperwork until someone has to awkwardly remind me that I was turned down for the job and that I need to go home and learn the important difference acceptance and rejection. Despite the fact that this is still yet to happen to me, it remains a constant and ludicrous worry and yesterday's misunderstanding can only mean that I'm one step closer to one of my greatest fears coming true. Thankfully the little dent to my pride has appeared just in time otherwise it wouldn't be long until I found myself face to face with Trevor Nunn, being told that I've got it wrong yet again.

 Tomorrow it's back to actually applying for jobs just like everyone else. Or maybe I'll turn this new found talent for presuming roles are instantly mine until someone falls for it...

Tick Tock

After a wonderous day on Thursday, I strapped myself in and prepared myself for an almighty crash back down to earth. If I could be bothered, I'd go back and check where I left things on Friday but I know I can safely say that I was complaining about the lack of food. I'm sure there were numerous other complaints which were my parents to look at, they'd probably disown me and wonder how on earth their incredible parenting skills had resulted in such a whiny, ungrateful child.

Anyway, I have to admit that this weekend, on the whole, was pretty bloody fun. Much of it was spent running away from pretend monsters and if I wasn't doing that then I was either attacking them or screaming at them. Time in front of the camera, as always, was great. A monster-fighting heroine is not a role that comes my way very often so I've enjoyed it immensely. As the ravages of time take their hold, these parts are going to land at my increasingly achy feet less and less so I figure I need to make the most of them while people still foolishly let me have a go at them.

As usual, it was the time away from the camera that was tough. And it was namely to do with when I was due to finish. On Saturday, I'd been told that I'd be finishing by 5pm. Out of everyone on the shoot, I've probably been on set the most and after a 12 hour shoot on Friday, I was looking forward to a much shorter day. However, when I tell you that my lift to the location on Saturday morning was late by 45 minutes, you already know that my wrap time was becoming more unlikely than Scorsese coming up to me in Sainsburys, telling me how he loved my extensive work in student films and that he'd love to secure me a job in every shoot he's involved with between now and the end of time. Finally at the location, we were then subjected to another hour wait while the crew set up the first shot. Finally in front of the camera, everything went swimmingly and we started racing through the shots needed.

As we approached my wrap time, everything started to take longer. Everyone started messing about and the director suddenly decided that each shot needed at least 18 takes, regardless of how well the first one went. My 5pm home time started to become a distant memory and I was then promised I'd be done by 8pm. That time came and went and I was then told I'd be out by 9pm. 9pm struck and I was still waiting to shoot my final scene. Finally at 10pm I was done and was told that I could leave. With a spring in my step, I got my stuff together only to find that there was no one available to get me back to the station. Normally I'm fine getting myself to these places but time + darkness + south London on a Saturday night meant that my desperation to get home was overriden by my desperation to keep hold of my belongings and my face. Another half an hour passed before I was finally released back into the wild, kicking and screaming and wondering why my job has become putting up with these things.

Thankfully I've already seen some of the rushes and I'm confident that at the end of it all, I'm going to have a piece of work that I'm actually proud of. I mean, when I say proud, I actually mean a piece of work that doesn't make me want to hack off my own face the second someone mentions it. It's far from perfect and I'm sure my accent travels around so much that it's almost solely responsible for global warming but it's made by people who know what they're doing and care about these things so that's got to count for something, right? All they need to do is buy a massive clock and hire Dervla Kirwin to dub everything I say and it might just work out...

So Long Saturday

Ah, the weekend. A time when you can be guaranteed a lie-in and you can be fairly safe in the knowledge that no one will be contacting you to travel to far-flung places to say a couple of words in the hope that you might secure a job that will reluctantly pay your travel expenses. It's Saturday. Why would anyone need you to make a 90 minute trip to utter maybe a minute's worth of speech? Of course, I realise I'm stupid. Only if you have a nice, normal job can you be certain that you won't be called up to travel 20 miles to play a religious fanatic from the Deep South who is partially sighted with a limp. But I don't have a nice, normal job so that's exactly what I found myself doing yesterday.

It was the same people that I worked for last weekend and they needed someone to play a few small roles. Flattered to be considered, I duly accepted without a thought to the fact that I was giving up yet another weekend to flit around London for no money. I mean, I wasn't going to be earning any money anyway over the weekend and at least when you're trapped on set for hours and hours, the chances of spending any cash are pretty damn limited so I suppose they were actually doing me a favour. The call time was midday which would normally be fine but the set was pretty much on the other side of the world (west London) so I found myself crawling out of bed at a time that really shouldn't be legal on a Saturday morning. It's one thing getting up at that time when you know you're going to be the star of the show but the effort becomes far greater when you realise that you're sacrificing your weekend for the sake fo a few lines and a half-baked character.

However, how wrong I was. I got to play a handful of fun characters, most of which were just voiceovers which meant I got to play around with my dreadful catalogue of accents. Northern, Deep South and Cockney all got a look in yesterday although I'm sure they all ended up sounding like various versions of Welsh in the end.

So, on set, much fun was to be had. However, it was off set where the tedium lied. Off set can be dull at best. The bulk of filming is waiting around and therefore a fully charged phone and a damn good book are your bestest friends. A good cast are also crucial too as you'll often find that you end up spending more time nattering with them and your book goes largely unread and your phone hardly checked. But yesterday no one seemed to want to really talk. As soon as we were on set, novels were whipped out of bags and phones were constantly monitored. The usual questions were fired out.Where did you train? What are you working on at the moment? Where did you travel from today? Do you lie awake at night wondering whether anyone will ever pay you to work again? OK, one of those is a lie. No one ever dares ask anyone what else they're working on at the moment. As a question it's far too loaded and encourages boastful actors to start listing off all the projects they're involved in for the next decade and it allows depressed actors to enter a monologue of self-pity and bitterness. So very little was said at all. One actress made it her mission to turn the few conversations that were held into a game of Top Trumps where she tried to better everyone else with her dismal tales of her vague acting past. I find this behaviour tiresome and sadly it just prevented me from trying to start any further backstage chats. Of course, these people are almost impossible to stop and I'm sorry to say that even as she was leaving set, I could hear her boring the ears off someone as she rattled on about some supposedly hilarious incident that happened before the world began.

Next weekend sees even more filming . This time I'll ensure I'm fully prepared with a box of conversation starts, plenty of ear plugs and enough mouth gags to stop even the most determined of acting bores...

Sod's Law

I like to try and at least loosely theme my blogs. This stops me going off and wittering on and telling you about pointless little moments in my life such as what I ate for dinner last night and that leaf I saw that looked like a very small dog. As interesting as I know you would all find these facts, I have to stop myself from bringing them up otherwise you'd all just be hassling me for the titbits from my day and we'd all lose the point of what this blog is really about...a whinging actress.

But today I've just got a few things that I want to pass on. Things that I'm sure I could tie together if I could be bothered and sit and come up with a theme but I can't. I've spent a good ten minutes wondering what music to get dressed to so coming up with a theme for today's offerings is far beyond me.

Firstly, to yesterday's second audition. My thoughts were that it would be a bit of a waste of time. Despite it being vaguely paid, it was a long way to go for an incredibly short script so I set off not feeling quite as optimistic as I should have done. But how wrong I was. It's for the funnest sounding project since The Tony Rich Project. (Yes, I realise 'Nobody Knows' ain't a fun song but as I explained earlier, I'm feeling lazy today...) It's for an art project and despite having to spend a lot of the audition pretending that I know a lot more about art than I do, it was a lovely hour well spent.

Next up is the Sod's Law section of today's blog. So I'm filming this weekend which is all great. It's a nice feeling when you're on a constant search for work to then be able to tell people that you're filming all weekend. Friends have asked if I'm around for a night out but I can't because I'm "filming all weekend." This has made me feel way more important that I should do and instead of feeling all smug about actually having an acting job, I should probably spend that time learning the lines for the damn thing. My current method seems to be that if I'm in the same room as the script for long enough then I'll learn them. So far this has had limited success although I know the front cover off by heart. Anyway, I digress. So, this morning, I get an offer to be the lead in a music video. Hooray. I hadn't even auditioned for it. But of course, and I reckon you've already guessed this, it's being filmed this weekend. I'm going from having no work at all to having to turn things down. Damn you Sod and the laws you came up with.

And for the final piece of news...I've been pencilled in for the ad I went up for yesterday. Now I've been pencilled in more times than a full sketch book so I know that most of the time, you get the initial excitement of being told to keep dates free and then you never hear anything again. A particular supermarket that thinks all the small things are particularly helpful has pencilled me in for just about every advert they've ever produced yet my grinning face is still yet to feature in any of them. I should be hearing tomorrow about whether they're still interested so I've got roughly 24 hours of glee until the misery returns.

Hmmm it seems that the theme, despite me thinking that there wasn't one, is 'self-indulgent.' I apologise for this breach in character. I promise that normal doom and gloom service will return tomorrow.