Auditions

We’ve been doing auditions for Chekhov in Hell. It’s very important to be at the audition because it gives you a much better sense of what the director’s thinking about the play; it also gives you a chance to really think hard about what the play requires.

In this instance, I discover that Chekhov in Hell is a bugger to play. About half of the play comprises scenes where Chekhov meets a contemporary ‘type’. These scenes are, dare I say, funny, satirical, and somewhat sketch-length (3 minutes or so). My instinct was to go for comic actors who can do the lightness, the pace and, obviously, the comedy. I think what I/we discovered is that we need actors who can find the truthfulness and the pathos in the characters; we saw some brilliant people who nonetheless just hit the comedy and you could tell it would turn the play into a sketch show. What I don’t want is some actor who would start working out some enormously complicated backstory for the character and get lost in that and not play the lines. But of course, no one wants that. But what we do need is someone who, over the course of a three-week rehearsal process, will build a strong architecture for their performance and build a real ensemble together. Simon put it rather well: ‘We need from them a very large creation of a character, done very simply’.

These characters need to live, because increasingly, through the play we should sympathise with the people; not what they do or say but perhaps with what they are trying to do and for their position - trapped in the idiocies they have only part-created for themselves. So, it’s a real eye-opener about the play.

Fortunately, it’s also clear that the play is funny and that when you play the lines, observing the rhythm and choices at each stage, it works, it’s very speakable, and has real energy. It’s revealing things about the lines that I want to tinker with and fortunately I have time.

That said, God I hate auditions. First it’s the neediness, the desperation. Not actually that we had too much of that on Friday, but often there’s just a horrible sense of someone in a hideously powerless position who just wants to please you. I think some directors probably enjoy that. My director asked them, after a bit of banter, what they thought of the play. I found it impossible to meet their gaze, because it’s like holding a gun to someone’s head and asking them to say how much they love you. I didn’t enjoy the compliments because I kind of couldn’t trust them and found it all a bit humiliating. I discover that I like a position of authority and sometimes that brings with it power. But in an audition I don’t really have authority, only power.

God though, actors are extraordinary people. I think they’re kind of wired up differently from other people. It’s the willingness, the direct way they can change emotion, feign and feel emotion, or the way they will just have a go at anything. I’m just too self-conscious to do most of that stuff so I find it wonderful when actors can turn on a sixpence. In social situations, it accounts for both the affectionate way actors are, but also the guardedness. I think they are so used to letting it all hang out, actors have also to protect some deep core of them that is just them. Writers don’t need to protect anything because the writing hides you.

I’ve not auditioned much. Showstopper we auditioned. I wasn’t involved with auditions for Static, except inasmuch as we tried out some of the actors through workshops. I didn’t have much say over the actors in Here’s What I Did. So this is an interesting, if horrible, process. It certainly is teaching me about my own play.