National Theatre Connections Monologues: Speeches for Young Actors

Description

For the first time, there is an anthology of monologues for young people available, taken from plays commissioned as part of the National Theatre Connections over the past 20 years. Always drawing together the work of 10 leading playwrights - a mixture of established and current writers - the annual National Theatre Connections anthologies offer young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study. Each play is specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department and reflects the past year's programming at the venue in the plays' ideas, themes and styles. The plays are performed by approximately 200 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional regional theatres where the works are showcased. This anthology of 100 monologues is the ideal resource for teenagers and young people attending auditions either in the amateur or professional theatre world; students leaving secondary school to audition for drama school; as well as teachers of English and Drama looking for suitable dramatic for their students to engage with and perform. It provides suitable scene-study books that are suitable and relevant to the student in terms of tone, style and content. Young actors who have searched for audition material written in the voice of teenage characters will welcome this resource.

Anthony Banks is Associate Director for the National Theatre Discover Programme, where he commissions scripts for the Connections seasons, the Primary Theatre programme and Shakespeare Schools Festival, and curates a variety of projects and events for lifelong learning. He is also a professional director, and leads workshops on directing new plays and contributes to books and journals about theatre.

To think that 20 years of this type of theatre work could potentially become available to young people everywhere in the form of an anthology of handpicked NT Connections monologues - with background text analysis and character direction notes - only further fuelled my fervour as a theatre director who advocates strongly the innate power of the youth actor at play. This is a book that has to published - if for no other reason than the subject alone is worth it. NT Connections an anthology - a gathering of creative like minds. -- Mhairi Gilbert - Artistic Director of PACE This anthology is an excellent idea. Using monologues from the plays that have been commissioned for NT Connections would provide young people with a wide and varied choice of speeches best suited to their age group. Many young people audition for Scottish Youth Theatre's summer courses. They tend to select speeches from classic plays that have been suggested to them by adults who they trust. The speeches are usually about subjects and from periods that are alien to them. When using the selected monologues, the young people will relate to the character and will recognize the character's voice - this should give them a greater sense of ownership of the speech. For this reason alone I feel that this anthology would be of great value to them. -- Mary McCluskey, Artistic Director of Scottish Youth Theatre