Journeys End Audition

by sally on Monday, July 12, 2010
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Auditions

Journey’s End: Written by RC Sheriff and directed by Simon Atkins

Audition Dates: Sunday 18^th July at 2.30 and Friday 30^th July at 7.30 at the Swan Theatre Studio, Worcester (next door to the theatre)

Production Dates: Tuesday 9^th to Saturday 13^th November 2010

Characters (all male)

Stanhope:  Commanding Officer.  Playing age 21.  Central role (see play description).  Very strong, confident actor required. Described as tall, and slim.  Moody.  A drinker.  Irritable and bad-tempered, but charismatic.  A natural leader, admired and respected by his company.

Osborne: Second in command.  Older – about 45.  “Physically as hard as nails”.   Extremely brave, calm, kind and caring.  Loyal.  Grey hair.

Trotter: Officer.  Described as “short and fat, middle-aged and homely looking.   His face is red, fat and round.”   We don’t need to follow this description to the letter, but he is a jolly, quite humorous character.  Nice role.

Hibbert: Officer.  Small, slightly built.  Early twenties.  Little moustache.  Claims to  be suffering from neuralgia and wants to be sent home.  Very dramatic scene with Stanhope who claims he is going to shoot him for deserting.

Raleigh: The new young officer, aged about 18.  Naïve, very enthusiastic, hero-worships Stanhope (his older sister is Stanhope’s girlfriend).  Think  serious version of Lieutenant George (Hugh Laurie) in Blackadder Goes Forth.  Some very dramatic scenes with Stanhope.  Another lovely role for a talented young actor.

The Colonel: Nice cameo role for an older actor.

Company Sergeant-Major:  “A huge man, with heavy black moustache, a fat red face, and massive chin.”  What one would expect S-M to be like anyway!

Mason:   The officers’ cook (a better cook than Baldrick!).  Lovely comedy role, but still must be absolutely truthful and believable. 

Hardy: Officer of another regiment.  Only appears in the first scene.

Young German Soldier: A prisoner.  Appears in one scene and has a few lines in German and broken English.

Two young private soldiers : Non-speaking.

SCRIPTS: can be borrowed from Bygones of Worcester by the Cathedral. (9-30 -5-30 (Except 1-2 on Saturdays))

 Sign yours OUT with date and address, and date RETURNED – within 3 days please and certainly by Saturday morning before the first audition.

The AUDITION will be a combination of reading scenes and moving them, and some improvisation exercises.  Rehearsals will be decided once the play has been cast, but expect to be called two or three times per week over an eight-week period.  

WORKSHOP AND BACKSTAGE PERSONNEL are of course required.  This is a very technical show with complex lighting and sound plots, pyrotechnics, lots of props and a set that has to partially collapse at the end of each performance so lots of help is required!  Please come to one of the auditions if you are interested.

If you can’t make either audition, please email contact@stac-worcester.com or speak to Simon. 

The Play
Especially for remembrance week, STAC present a modern classic and one of the great plays of the twentieth century. Journey’s End is a powerful and moving account of life in the trenches during the final weeks of the First World War. Written less than a decade after the end of the war in which the author himself served as a captain, the play gives a first-hand account of the agonising tension, the waiting, the comradeship, heroism and tragic loss that was the daily life of those in the front line.
Captain Dennis Stanhope is 21 years old, yet he has been in the army for nearly three years, and has led his company for a year. He is loved and admired by the men who serve under him, and by the officers who serve alongside him, yet he himself admits that if he wasn’t “doped with whisky I’d go mad with fright”. When the new young officer unexpectedly turns out to be the admiring 18-year-old brother of Stanhope’s sweetheart back home, tensions reach breaking point, and the new arrival finds his former friend and sporting hero dramatically changed…
The first production of Journey’s End made stars of the 25-year-old Laurence Olivier who played Stanhope, and of Sherriff, who went on to have a long and distinguished career in films, writing screenplays for such classics as Goodbye Mr Chips (1933) and The Dam Busters (1955).
The play requires strong, emotional but totally convincing performances from everyone in the cast, but particularly the principal characters. I shall be looking for actors who can give natural, sensitive, truthful performances. Think Blackadder Goes Forth as a drama rather than a sit-com.
All actors must be willing to have appropriately short hair cuts for the production if required.
The play is a GCSE English set text and I am expecting it to be popular with schools as well as the general public, particularly given the timing of our production. The performance on Remembrance Day should be particularly poignant.