National Youth Theatre Monologues: 75 Speeches for Auditions by various playwrights

The problem with any book of monologues for audition purposes is that compiling them into a collection places them in a canon of work which those conducting the auditions will see time and time again. Students are rightfully wary of making their own unique mark when repeating the same texts.

It is with relief then that this bang up-to-date collection goes off the beaten track of regularly recited work by plundering the back catalogue of texts produced by the National Youth Theatre (NYT) to give students a solid starting point. While the book chronicles NYT's history of well-known classics (Oedipus and Blood Wedding for example), it is the contemporary slant which gives this collection its edge, featuring dozens of monologues from productions staged in the last decade, with work from Zawe Ashton, James Graham, Evan Placey and Sarah Solemani.