Friday, 25 August 2006
Theatre West autumn season 2006 auditions
by Tim Massey
Arrived a little late for the auditions at St Werburghs Community Centre having caught a taxi from town. Although auditioning had begun promptly at 10am, I'd missed nothing because Sam was giving the first batch of actors a chance to familiarise themselves with the scenes he'd picked for the sessions (two, five and six). He whispered to me that he liked the rewrites I'd done since our last meeting.
It was the first time I'd heard any of the script aloud and I was pleased that the dialogue came off the page well – there were even a few laughs from the performers. Sam began by asking the actors to do some readings to judge their instinctive interpretations before giving them 'brushstrokes' of direction for walkthroughs of the scenes. The intuitive readings were good and many of those auditioning managed to hit exactly the right pace and tone with only scant context. There were some problems with the pronunciation of 'ceilidh', but there's a joke about this in the play.
I feel that the scene outside the ceilidh (five) is a little flat and needs more dramatic subtext to drive it, so it was useful to workshop this as part of the audition. The actors made a reasonable fist of the extract after working with it for a while, but I'm going to rewrite rather than relying on rehearsals to punch it up.
Sam and I compared notes over lunch and agreed on the pick of the morning's talent. Auditions were being held for the whole of Theatre West's autumn season with the aim of casting a 'rep' company of five or six actors to perform all five plays. Because of this, our final cast depended on the choices of the directors of the other shows, so we were looking for first and second options to give us room to manoeuvre. Following our last audition in the afternoon, we had a couple of potential performers in mind for each of the three characters in Salt'n'Sauce.
When the auditions had all finished, the five directors – Pameli Benham (directing The Keith Ashton Experience by Mark Breckon), Sam Berger (Salt'n'Sauce), Andy Burden (The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses by Steve Hennessy), Alison Comley (The Voice that Keeps Silent by David Carter) and Caroline Hunt (Eggshell Blues by Sarah Curwen) - gathered to decide on the company line-up. Ann Stiddard, Theatre West's joint artistic director (with Alison Comley), Mark Breckon and I also sat in on the process.
Final casting began with the directors writing the names of their first choice of actors on individual Post-It notes and sticking them up under the play titles on a whiteboard. This gave an outline of the actors who were most in demand. Unfortunately, none of our first choices for Salt'n'Sauce featured on any of the other lists, and the other directors had also picked from across the range of those auditioning. While this showed that the standard had been high and the majority of the actors would have won parts had the plays been cast individually, it made the task of arriving at a final choice of five or six seem more difficult.
Adding the directors' second choices to the mix helped reduce the spread by eliminating those performers who had been picked only once as first or second option. For further clarity, the directors drew smileys on the Post-Its bearing the names of the actors that they most wanted to cast. Fortunately, as with Salt'n'Sauce, the directors' preferences were quite marginal with a lot of interchangeability between first and second choices, so it wasn't too tough to negotiate the list down to a company of six. The whole process took about 50 minutes and we were done by 4.20pm.
My feeling is that the restriction of picking actors for a small rep company made for more creative casting. Freedom to make the obvious choices might lead to predictability and cliché, whereas the more limited field forced a fresher approach. The pros and cons of the casting process aside, I'm very happy with the final Salt'n'Sauce line-up – Caroline Garland as Emily, Paul Mundell as John, and Simon Winkler as Paul.