Wow, what a busy but exciting week that was. In addition to my day-to-day job – which this week also involved a night out with clients in Birmingham – I also made some interesting progress with my Acting career.
On Tuesday I attended The Actor’s Centre’s Agent-a-thon. This gave me the opportunity to sit down with an Agent (as the name suggests) and talk through my CV and photographs as well as getting some guidance on what the next steps I should be taking to further my career. I met with Kate Winn from KEW Personal Management and despite only having 10 minutes (which flies by) we managed to cover a lot of ground and I got some excellent pointers as to what to do next.
It was a great experience – after all how often can you get impartial advice from someone in the know?!
Then on Friday I had my first audition! This was with theatre director Russell Bolam and organised through Equity’s West & South West London branch. While the audition wasn’t for a specific part it was a chance to meet a director (who is looking to cast a Shakespeare show next year hopefully) and also get some practice in a real audition setting.
Russell currently has a show called Crushed Shells and Mud running at the Southwark Playhouse so Tuesday night I went to see it. It had some fantastically strong performances from the predominantly young cast. I also managed to sneak a matinee of Richard II at the Globe – albeit in the rain – as I hadn’t seen any Shakespeare for a while and felt I ought to have.
I think the audition on the whole went ok. We had a good chat before and after I delivered my speech, which went pretty well – although looking back I should have done something more in keeping with my ‘type’ rather than a speech/character I enjoy. In hindsight (which we all know is a wonderful thing) there were some rookie errors, which are understandable given it was my first audition in over a decade but I will definitely need to make sure I don’t make again in the future.
Onwards and upwards to the next thing – whatever that will be?!
William Baylis 