Guide 01 · Extended

The monologue, to international standard.

What examiners and adjudicators actually assess, and how to build a piece that satisfies all three of the domains they mark against.

Almost every serious assessment framework in the English-speaking world — LAMDA, Trinity College London, the eisteddfod circuit, and the audition panels of the conservatoires — marks solo performance against the same three domains, whatever they choose to call them. Once you can see those three domains, preparation stops being guesswork.

This guide is written from the marking side. It assumes you are willing to work, and it does not pretend that talent substitutes for method.

Part OneWhat you are actually marked on

The vocabulary differs between boards. The substance does not.

Two observations that change how most entrants prepare.

First: interpretation and technique are weighted equally. A deeply felt performance that cannot be heard past row four scores no better than a beautifully articulated one that is emotionally inert. Entrants tend to be strong in one and neglect the other, and the mark sheet punishes that imbalance precisely.

Second: knowledge is a fifth of the mark and it is the cheapest fifth on the sheet. It requires no talent whatsoever — only that you read the play and think about it. It is routinely the difference between a Merit and a Distinction, and it is routinely thrown away.

Part TwoChoosing the piece

More marks are lost at selection than at any other stage, and they are lost before a single rehearsal happens. A piece that is wrong for you cannot be rescued by work.

The non-negotiables

• It must come from a published play. Not a monologue anthology written for exams, not a film transcript, not something generated for you. Panels and adjudicators know the anthology pieces, and a speech with no play behind it has no given circumstances to research — which cripples you in the knowledge domain.
• You must read the whole play. Guildhall states this outright in its audition guidance. You cannot know what a line costs a character if you do not know what it follows.
• It must sit inside the syllabus. Check this year's requirements, not last year's: time limit, genre, whether verse is required, whether the piece must be contemporary or classical.

Casting truth

Choose a character you could plausibly be cast as now. Guildhall advises that at least one piece be "close to you in age and life experience." A sixteen-year-old performing a bereaved fifty-year-old is asking the panel to imagine two things at once: the character, and the actor they might become. That is a harder sell than a piece within reach, played completely.

Contrast

Where two or more pieces are required, they must genuinely contrast — in period, register, rhythm and emotional temperature. Two intense contemporary pieces about grief are one piece performed twice. Many conservatoires additionally require one speech in verse.

The three tests

1. Can I defend every line? If there is a sentence you do not understand, you will perform it as decoration. An adjudicator hears that immediately.
2. Does something change? A speech in which the character finishes as they started is a recitation. You need a turn — a moment where the thought shifts, the tactic fails, or the truth arrives.
3. Is it happening now? Prefer speeches of active crisis to speeches of retrospective narration. A character deciding is dramatic; a character remembering is usually description.

Part ThreeTextual analysis

This is the work that produces the interpretation mark, and it is done at a desk with a pencil before it is ever done on your feet.

Given circumstances

Answer these in writing, in one sentence each: Who am I? Where am I, precisely? What time is it? Who am I speaking to? What happened in the thirty seconds before my first line? What do I want? What happens if I do not get it?

That last question is the one entrants skip, and it is the one that generates urgency. If nothing is lost by failure, nothing is at stake, and the performance will be pleasant and forgettable.

Text and subtext

Go through the speech and mark every line where the character is not saying what they mean. Those lines are your richest material. A performance that plays only the surface meaning of every line is what examiners call indicating — showing the audience an emotion rather than pursuing an intention.

Units and objectives

Divide the speech into units with a pencil line. Above each, write one transitive verb: to warn, to shame, to seduce, to disarm, to accuse, to plead, to dismiss. This is called actioning.

Verbs must be playable and directed at someone. "To be sad" is not an action — it is a state, and states cannot be performed, only imitated. "To make her feel guilty" is an action: it has a target and a measurable result. Emotion is a by-product of pursuing an action against resistance. Chase the emotion directly and you get sentimentality; chase the action and the emotion arrives honestly.

Part FourThe target

A monologue is not a speech to an audience. It is one half of a scene in which the other person does not get to reply. The single most common technical failure in eisteddfod work is a performer who has not decided who they are talking to.

Fix, specifically and unchangeably:

• Who they are — a named person, with a face you can actually picture.
• Where they are — a fixed point, slightly above the heads of the audience or just off-centre, never wandering.
• How far away they are — this alone governs your volume, your urgency and your physical scale more than any other decision.
• What they are doing while you speak — turning away, weeping, refusing to look at you. Their imagined reactions are what make your changes of tactic legible.

Never make eye contact with the adjudicator or the audience

This is an absolute. Not a preference, not a stylistic choice — a rule, and one of the fastest ways to identify a trained performer from an untrained one within the first five seconds.

The adjudicator is working. Meeting their eyes obliges them to become your scene partner at the precise moment they need to be assessing you, and it forces them to break the exchange by looking down at the sheet — which is a bad thing to have caused. Meeting the eyes of the audience does something subtler but equally damaging: it collapses the world of the play into the room you are standing in, and invites the people watching to respond as themselves rather than to witness the character.

Set your focus point above the back row, or clearly to one side of the panel — high enough that no one in the room believes you are looking at them, low enough that you are not staring at the ceiling. Then hold it. A focus point that drifts is worse than none at all, because drifting eyes read as lost lines.

Where a piece is genuinely direct-address — a soliloquy, or a character breaking the fourth wall — the audience becomes the notional listener, but the rule does not change: you speak to them and past them, using focus points out over the house rather than fixing on individual faces. Know which of the two forms you are performing. Playing a soliloquy as though a second person were present, or an intimate two-hander out to the room, is an interpretive error and reads as one.

Where a monologue contains more than one character — you are quoting a mother, answering a teacher — give each of them their own fixed focus point, and return to the same point every time that character is addressed. Inconsistent placement is one of the commonest reasons an adjudicator cannot follow who is speaking to whom.

Part FiveVocal technique

Half the technique mark. Assessed on control, not volume.

Breath

Breath is taken low, into the base of the lungs, so the ribs and abdomen expand rather than the shoulders lifting. Shoulder-breathing is shallow, audible, and rises in pitch under pressure — which is why nervous performers sound thin. Breathe at the punctuation and at unit boundaries, and plan those breaths deliberately: an unplanned breath in the middle of a thought fractures the sense.

Projection is not volume

The test is simple: can someone at the back wall hear an intimate line without you appearing to raise your voice? If your quiet moments vanish past row six, you have no dynamic range — and dynamic range is where the interpretive marks live.

Modulation

Pace is the most misused. Nerves accelerate everything, and an accelerated piece loses its pauses first — which is where meaning sits. Mark your two or three longest pauses in the script and treat them as fixed obligations, not optional colour. Hold them longer than feels comfortable; on the day they will shrink by half regardless.

Operative words

Go through the text and underline one operative word per phrase. No more. Performers who stress everything communicate nothing; emphasis is only legible against unemphasised ground.

Articulation

Consonants carry intelligibility; vowels carry emotion. Under pressure, final consonants are the first casualty, and a dropped final consonant is the commonest reason an adjudicator writes diction on a sheet. Work the ends of words specifically.

The recitation tune

Listen for a repeating melodic pattern — most often a rise through the line and a fall at the end of every sentence, regardless of sense. It is the audible signature of a piece learned by rote rather than thought through, and adjudicators identify it within fifteen seconds. The cure is not vocal: it is returning to your unit objectives, because the tune appears when intention has been replaced by memory.

Part SixPhysical technique

Neutral

Establish a centred, balanced stance: weight even, spine lengthened, shoulders released, hands at rest. This is home. Every gesture reads against it, and a performer with no neutral has no punctuation — the body becomes continuous visual noise.

Stillness

Stillness is an active technique, not the absence of one. It concentrates attention and it is difficult, because nerves demand motion. Swaying, rocking, shifting weight and repetitive gesture all read as anxiety and all cost technique marks. The performer who can be genuinely still for four seconds while thinking commands a room.

Gesture

Gesture must arrive with or fractionally before the thought, never after the line that prompted it — late gesture reads as illustration, as though the body is subtitling the text. Keep gestures few and let them be full: a small number of complete gestures reads as control, many partial ones as fidgeting.

Orientation, and the danger of profile play

Stage orientation is described in five positions, and knowing their names lets you plan a performance rather than drift through one.

The quarter position is where most of a monologue should live. It is open enough for the face and voice to reach the room, angled enough to suggest a listener who is not the audience.

Profile play is the trap. Turning fully side-on is an easy, instinctive way to indicate that you are addressing someone off to the side, and performers reach for it constantly — particularly in pieces with more than one character. It costs you three things at once:

• Your face. Half of it is now invisible, and facial life is a substantial part of what is being assessed. Everything subtle you are doing is lost.
• Your voice. Sound travels where the mouth is pointed. In profile you are projecting across the stage rather than out into the hall, and your volume drops by a noticeable margin without your feeling it happen.
• Contact. A sustained profile reads as a performer who has turned away from the room.

The rule: profile is a transition, not a place to live. Pass through it, use it for a beat to mark a sharp change of address, then return to quarter. If you find yourself delivering four or five consecutive lines in profile, restage them.

Full back is stronger than it looks and should be used almost never — perhaps once, deliberately, on a single moment of concealment or refusal, and then only if you can afford to lose the line. Never speak an important line with your back to the room.

Never walk backwards

Not on, not off, and not to return to a starting position. It is one of the clearest markers of an untrained performer, and it fails on four separate counts.

It is unsafe — you cannot see the edge of a stage, a step, a cable or a chair behind you, and adjudicators have watched entrants fall doing it. It is unmotivated — real people almost never retreat backwards, so the movement belongs to no character and reads as the performer, not the role. It reads as retreat, draining authority from whatever you have just said, and if it comes at the end it undermines the entire piece. And it is slow, so it stretches the least interesting part of your performance across the panel's final impression.

The correction is simple. If you must return to a starting position, plan a motivated turn: complete the thought, take the beat, turn cleanly on your own timing, and walk forward. To leave, turn and go — face where you are going, and let the exit be as decided as the entrance.

Space and eyeline

Most eisteddfod and examination monologues are best served by minimal movement: a step or two, motivated by a change of tactic, not by restlessness. If you move, arrive somewhere and stay. Movement on every unit is as monotonous as no movement at all.

Keep your eyeline lifted and open. Dropping the eyes to the floor at moments of emotion is the instinctive choice and it closes the face precisely when the panel needs to read it.

Part SevenShaping the performance

The piece begins before your first line and ends after your last. Both margins are assessed, and both are routinely under-rehearsed.

Entrance and introduction

Walk on more slowly than feels natural. Hurrying on reads as apology. Where the syllabus requires you to announce title and author, do so in your own voice — not in character — clearly, unhurriedly, looking at the panel. Then take a distinct beat, drop your eyes or turn, and let the character arrive. That visible transition is itself a mark of training.

The first ten seconds

The panel forms an impression of your competence almost immediately, and it colours everything after. Your opening must be the most secure passage in the piece — not the loudest or the most emotional, but the most certain. Rehearse the first ten seconds more than any other segment.

The arc

Know where the peak is, and know that there can only be one. Map your dynamic shape deliberately: if you begin at maximum intensity you have nowhere to travel, and the piece will plateau. Build the ascent, and give the peak room by making what precedes it quieter than instinct suggests.

The final moment

Hold the last thought. Do not release the character on the final syllable — stay in the given circumstances for two full seconds, let the moment land, then break cleanly, return to yourself, and acknowledge the panel. Dropping character early is the most common way a strong performance loses its ending, and endings weigh disproportionately on the recollection of the person writing the sheet.

The exit

Then leave properly: turn, and walk forward, at a measured pace. Do not reverse out of the space — not a step of it. Backing away from the panel undoes the composure you have just spent two minutes establishing, and it is the last thing they see before they write. Nor should you hurry: an exit taken at speed reads as relief, which tells the room you were enduring the piece rather than performing it.

Part EightMemorisation and rehearsal

All examination and eisteddfod performance is from memory. But being off-book and having ownership are different conditions, and only the second survives adrenaline.

Learn the piece by unit and by objective rather than by sentence. Lines learned as a chain fail catastrophically: break one link and everything after it is unreachable. Lines learned as a sequence of intentions degrade gracefully, because you still know what you want next even if the exact phrasing has gone.

A working countdown

Over-rehearsal in the final week is a genuine risk: it produces a mechanically flawless, emotionally dead performance. The piece is a living thing and it can be handled to death.

Part NineKnowledge — the fifth of the mark most people give away

LAMDA allocates 20 to 25 marks to knowledge. Trinity assesses reflection and context from Grade 4 upward, and at the higher grades expects candidates to discuss how period, culture and character development shaped their choices. Audition panels ask the same questions less formally, and judge you on the answers.

Be able to answer these fluently, aloud, without notes:

• What is the play about — in three sentences, not a plot summary.
• Who wrote it, roughly when, and what was going on around it.
• Who is your character, and what do they want across the whole play?
• What happens immediately before and immediately after this speech?
• Who are you speaking to, and what is your relationship to them?
• Why did you choose this piece? — Have a real answer. "My teacher gave it to me" is audible.
• What was the hardest thing about it, and what did you do about it?

At the most advanced grades you may be asked about practitioners — Stanislavski, Brecht, Meisner — and how their principles informed your approach. If you are working at that level, be able to name one practitioner and describe one concrete thing you did because of them.

Part TenThe faults that most often cost marks

In rough order of frequency, from the adjudicator's side of the table.

1. No decided target. The speech is delivered to the room in general and therefore to nobody.
2. Eye contact with the panel or the audience, forcing the adjudicator to look away mid-performance.
3. Dropped final consonants, worsening as the piece intensifies.
4. Sustained profile play — face half-lost, voice thrown across the stage instead of into the hall.
5. The recitation tune — a melodic pattern repeating regardless of meaning.
6. One tactic throughout. No units, so no variety, so no arc.
7. Emotional flooding at the top, leaving nowhere to build.
8. Unmotivated movement — swaying, drifting, restless hands.
9. Walking backwards, on entrance, on exit, or returning to position.
10. Character dropped on the final syllable, discarding the ending.
11. Pace accelerating under nerves, with the pauses lost first.
12. Drifting focus points, or a second character placed somewhere different each time.
13. A piece outside the performer's casting range, chosen for its emotional size.
14. Play unread — invariably exposed by the first knowledge question.

Part ElevenSelf-assessment before you compete