Audition Notice
‘The Approach’ by Mark O’Rowe
Director: Mark Wilson. Production Manager: Tamsin Mastoris
Production dates: 21st to 29th March, 2025 (please note, Sunday 23rd March is a matinee performance).
Audition dates: 21st Nov. 7.00pm – 9.30pm + 23rd Nov 10.00am – 5.00pm.
Auditions are by appointment only. Please contact Tamsin on:
Call-backs: 30th Nov. 10.00am – 1.00pm
These will be used where necessary to gain a further insight into an actor’s work as well as to try out pairs of actors. Whether or not you are asked to the call-back is not an indication as to whether or not you will be invited to consider joining the cast.
The Text: Tamsin can supply a time-limited pdf version of the full script on request. However, NVT’s policy is that, if cast, you will be required to purchase a copy of the text from NVT. There will be script extracts available to use at the auditions.
NB. Anyone can audition for an NVT production, but, if cast, you will need to become members if not already. This also applies to crew.
Characters:
Three Irish women.
Cora, Anna and Denise. Anna and Denise are sisters. They are roughly the same age, in their 40s. However, we would encourage actors to audition who may be younger or older but who could pass for someone within that age range.
Story: Three women who were once very close – or so Cora thought. We listen in to three chance-meeting conversations spread over a period of five years that shift between the ‘every day’ and the profound, their interwoven threads picked up and taken forward each time two of the characters meet. As we never see the three of them together, it is the audience who begin to track the decisions each character makes about what to hold back from who they are talking with and what to reveal, and the way those choices are altered with each conversation.
This is a beautifully-written piece of work through which we are drawn to listen as much to what is left unsaid as to what can be heard. It deals with betrayal, rage and the letting-go of rage, with loss and with longing. We come to know their certainties and what, across the years, has happened to those certainties. It is funny and it is achingly sad.
Audition sections:
Cora: From (p18) Cora: Those nights really made an impression on me, though, you know that?
To Anna’s exit (p19)
Denise: From (p32) Cora: Would you not ever think about…?
To: (p33) Denise: All right?
Anna: From (p50) Denise: Okay. But for now…
To: (p51) Anna: No, that was good all right, but you know…. (Beat) Kennedy’s.
The Audition process:
The audition will be in two parts and will last around thirty minutes:
1. A conversation. (10 minutes approx.)
Purpose: There are no ‘right or wrong’ responses here - the rehearsal process is obviously where most of the exploration work will take place. I’m simply interested in listening to what the play, these three women, their interaction and their lives, mean to you.
2. Working on the audition section. (20 minutes approx.)
Purpose: This is about demonstrating how you act. I want to see how you take as well as create direction, how you actively contribute your sense of and ideas about the character and the scene and what you make use of as an actor to communicate those through your work. I want to find out if I can work with you. I want you to find out if you can work with me.
This will be like a rehearsal. We’ll be trying out ideas and then talking and then trying out some more and seeing what we make. Someone will read in the other character. You do not need to learn the audition part though it will obviously help you if you have become familiar with it.
The Characters: As we haven’t started the exploratory work, this can only be an initial guide as to how I see the characters:
Denise and Anna appear forthright and confident in articulating their feelings, particularly those they have for each other when they talk separately to Cora, and the sense of betrayal they each hold on to so tightly. Their fierce openness is demonstrated again in the intensity of their reconciliation in the third conversation. It would, though, be a mistake to see them simply as ‘loud women’ – they have far more depth than that – or as a carbon copy of each other. Part of the work of the actors playing Anna and Denise will be to develop and establish the presence on stage of two very different women.
Cora: Where there’s an open passion to Anna and Denise, there’s something more thoughtful, perhaps, though no less passionate, to Cora that it would be easy to mistake for timidity. She’s certainly not a victim, unafraid as she is to confront both sisters about the divide between them and articulate how she feels about her place within the group.
These are complex, multi-layered women. I am looking for actors who can identify, understand and feel those emotional layers and can communicate their richness to an audience, conveying what is not written on the page as much as what is. The key for me at the audition will be the way you demonstrate your initial ideas around those layers, how you use and play the silences, the choices you make about pace and volume, the way you listen.
Have a look at: www.theapproach.ie for background video interviews with the cast and extracts from the 2018 Dublin production.
Accents: We shall work towards developing Southern Irish accents. Extracts from the production on ‘The Approach’ site will give you some idea of how that sounds and feels. You may already be able to use an Irish accent. If not, it’ll be helpful if you can at least demonstrate a willingness to have a go at one. Success in gaining a part will not be dependent upon a perfect Irish accent at the audition.
Rehearsals. Our intention is to have a read-though and make a brief, two-or-three-rehearsal start in the first part of December and then begin in earnest in early January using two evenings a week, 7.00pm – 9.30pm and day-time Sundays, 11.00am – 3.00pm.
From mid/late February we will add a further week-day evening to the schedule. Fridays and Saturdays will be free until the last two weeks of the process. Rehearsals will start on time and will not over-run. Where work/caring commitments allow, we may rehearse in the day-time.
Any questions at all, please just ask me:
Mark Wilson