Reviews: Monologues for ‘Others’ by Charlie Josephine

The blurb on this set of monologues states that the selection is ‘for the “others”. For anyone who's ever felt othered. For us lot.’ In the introduction, Charlie Josephine reveals that it was a struggle to choose monologues for drama school applications because having been assigned female as birth, it was expected that a female character's speech would be selected. ‘I was seventeen, gender scrambled, working class, neurodiverse, and fucking frustrated,’ they write. Josephine opted for Juliet's ‘gallop apace’ speech but couldn't connect with it and wanted something ‘punchy’ for the contemporary choice.

It was even more difficult to find a contemporary monologue that was suitable, so Josephine opted to write a monologue and claim that a made-up writer had written it, audition after audition. Josephine says ‘eventually I did get into drama school, and I started writing to give myself parts. Because I couldn't find and characters like me, and I couldn't bear the pain of that anymore.’