Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown Learning Lines part 3 The people I am often most impressed with are actors in soap operas. Soaps are filmed incredibly fast - probably only 2 takes and then they move on. With a film, you might only finish a few minutes worth a week but soaps produce around 4-5 x 30 minute episodes a week! The actors have to know their lines and give an excellent performance - they have to be game ready all the time. In terms of learning lines then, their short term memory is probably very good. They will be able to learn a few pages of script very fast which they then forget equally quickly. It's a completely different thing to learning, say Hamlet, which for the title role has 1569 lines (the most lines any single character has in a play) and has to be replicated night after night. Actors who have played big roles like this will likely be able to recall huge swathes of text years later. There are lots of different methods - recordi
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Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown I've always liked and rated James McAvoy as an actor - he's very versatile. And having just watched Split directed by M Night Shyamalan, I'm convinced. Without giving too much away, McAvoy plays a man with Dissociative identity Disorder who kidnaps three teenage girls. His fluidity of movement between the personalities is extraordinary. So much so, that you know by the way he arranges his face, who of the personalities is "in the light" at the time. If you haven't seen it, I would recommend a watch. It's part of trilogy with Unbreakable (2000) and Glass (2019) Dissociative identity Disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder#:~:text=Dissociative%20identity%20disorder%20(DID)%2C,be%20explained%20by%20ordinary%20forgetfulness.
Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown Learning Lines part 2 The way in which the industry works is that there is often a very tight turn around between being asked in for an audition and the audition itself. I've had commercials castings take place hours after a call from my agent! This can be tricky then when it comes to learning lines. There are varying opinions about whether you should be off book for an audition - some casting directors and directors want it and some don't. The troubles arise when you have to learn something really fast. If you go into an audition having tried to learn it, there is a chance that all you'll be thinking about are the lines rather than the performance. Thorough preparation is of course key "Fail to prepare and prepare to fail" so goes the saying. I've lost count of the number times I've been running lines to myself on the tube and realise from some curious glances that I have clearly been making
Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown Learning Lines part 1 This is an occupational hazard for actors and one that people not in "the biz" often ask about - "How did you learn all those lines?" they marvel. And honestly sometimes I don't know. If something is well written, it is definitely easier to learn. Believe it or not, Shakespeare is relatively easy to commit to memory for this very reason - it flows. The biggest thing I've ever had to learn was something I wrote myself. In 2017 I took my solo show "Awake" to the Edinburgh and Sydney Fringe festivals. It was 45 solid minutes of me talking. That's a lot of lines. And it was particuarly irritating when I got any lines wrong because I'd written them! If you'd like to read about my adventures, I wrote a couple of blogs about them: Awake: Part 1 - The Road to Edinburgh Awake: Part 2 - The North and the South
Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown Day 101 101 as a number seems to have a number of well known associations. Room 101 Originated in "1984" by George Orwell - it was a torture room and not a place you wanted to end up. There is now of course the BBC TV show by the same name where celebrities get to rid the world of something they find irritating. 101 An Americanism widely used to mean a basic understanding of something e.g. Knowing the names of the strings of a guitar is guitar playing 101. 101 Is a prime number 101 The number of Dalmatians in the book by Dodie Smith and several films by Disney Today it hit 31°c - what a scorcher!
Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown DAY 100 of my blog! How has this happened! To clarify, I started the blog on Monday 16th March - this was the first day of this strange new world but a week before official lockdown started, which was Monday 23rd March. What can I say to summarise the past 100 days? In the World · We have predominantly stayed in our homes and kept 2 meters apart from one another when out. · After the initial panic buying of toilet paper, flour became the impossible commodity to locate, as did yeast and a million people embarked on a sour-dough starter. · The megalomaniac on the other side of the pond recommended drinking bleach as a cure-all · The Black Lives Matter movement has finally received the airtime, space and serious attention that it deserves. · People have either cut their own hair or are now rockin' looks from the 70's and man-buns · The air and water ways h
Location: London, UK COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak Lockdown Yesterday was International Yoga Day. I love yoga and have been practising on and off since I was about 18. Finding a good yoga teacher though is a bit like playing roulette. Over the years as I have belonged to various gyms and have moved around the country for work, I've encounted some great teachers and some truly awful. I was on tour many years ago and me and a couple of members of the cast went to a class at the local gym. The teacher was, if I'm being generous, not good. She was so "not good" that we got the giggles and found it very difficult to take her seriously. I did feel bad for her, but at the same time, she was clearly out of her depth when the whole class knew more about her subject that she did. Maybe she was filling in, I don't know, but it wasn't good. I always feel sad for people when they have been to a yoga class and have clearly not had a good teacher because they haven