The Extreme Staycation

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 me...

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