Classical Monologues for Women

By Marina Calderone

The Good Audition Guides: Helping you select and perform the audition piece that is best suited to your performing skills
Each Good Audition Guide contains a range of fresh monologues, all prefaced with a summary of the vital information you need to place the piece in context and to perform it to maximum effect in your own unique way.
Each volume also carries a user-friendly introduction on the whole process of auditioning.
Classical Monologues for Men contains 50 monologues drawn from classical plays throughout the ages and ranging across all of Western Theatre:
- Classical Greek and Roman
- Elizabethan and Jacobean
- French and Spanish Golden Age
- Restoration and Eighteenth Century
- Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 'sound practical advice for anyone attending an audition... so many of these extracts simply cry out to be performed... a source of inspiration for teachers and students alike... a must' Teaching Drama

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jun 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780010847

Book preview

Classical Greek and Roman

The Greek tragedies drew on existing myths and wrapped them up in contemporary Greek history. They are cautionary tales of how to live in what the Greeks considered a brave new world of civilisation. By contrast, the comedies are akin to situation comedies, and generally play anarchically within very established social hierarchies.

The Greeks lived in a world very different from ours today. It was savaged by war, a brutal time when life was cheap. Women were lesser citizens and slaves were people you could practically buy off a shelf. The gods controlled everything and everyone, even sometimes coming to earth to mate with mortals and breed demi-gods. Human sacrifice to the gods was considered normal, and a dialogue could be conducted with them via the Oracles, the soothsayers and the visionaries.

The dramas are huge in their sheer sweep of narrative, and graphic in their depiction of violence. Audiences would pass out at a messenger’s description of a horrific death in messy, Tarantino-style detail. The plays were performed in the open air, often in enormous theatres, and with the actors (all male) wearing full face masks.

In the plays of ancient Athens and Rome, psychology is less important than story, and what characters and themes represent. When acting, it’s difficult and unhelpful to play a theme or a representation, but it is important to bear your character’s function in mind. Finding this function is subjective; there are no right or wrong choices. In her speech, Electra could represent, for example, the avenging spirit of Justice.

Don’t be put off by the fact that the characters are high born, often royalty. Playwrights chose characters whom their audience would relate to as the best of themselves. The stories would be about them, but they would also be sufficiently removed from the characters to learn the ‘lesson’ of the drama and experience the cathartic power of the work. The audience is actually represented by the chorus, the commonsense voice of reasonable men (and women).

The use of masks would have fostered a highly stylised and formalised method of presentation. But today, classical plays are performed in all manner of different styles: epic, domestic, naturalistic or broadly comic. The monologues that follow here would serve a whole variety of differing presentational styles.

Electra

Sophocles (c. 415 BC), trans. Kenneth McLeish

WHO  Electra, living as a beggar though the young daughter of the Queen of Argos. Sister to Orestes. 20s.

WHERE  An open courtyard outside the palace of Mycenae in Argos.

TO WHOM  To the ashes of her supposed dead brother. The chorus, the bearer of the ashes and his friend are present.

WHEN  Ten years after the end of the Trojan war, around 1300 BC.

WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED  Electra is in mourning for the murder of her father, Agamemnon, butchered by her mother Clytemnestra and her consort on his return from the Trojan War. Electra’s one hope was that her brother, Orestes, who had been sent away for his own safety, would avenge the death. But news has arrived that he has been killed abroad in a chariot race, and she has just been presented with an urn containing her beloved brother’s ashes. All her hopes have died along with him. She does not know that the reports of his death were false to ensure his safety and that he is actually the bearer of the ashes. So moving is the speech that it prompts him to reveal his true identity.

WHAT SHE WANTS / OBJECTIVES TO PLAY

Electra

I loved you more than anyone alive, dearest Orestes,

and here is all that remains of you, all that remains

of all my hopes when I let you leave.

A dear radiant little boy when I sent you away,

what are you now? A handful of dust.

I wish to God I had died earlier

before I rescued you and sent you into exile

in a foreign land, to protect you from being killed.

At least if you had died on the same day as your father,

you and he could have shared a family tomb.

But, as it is, abroad, a distant exile,

you died a wretched death, parted from your