Where this advice actually comes from
Active, not narrative. It is the one thing everybody in this subject agrees on, and we were about to present that agreement as evidence. Then we looked at who the everybody was.
Six sources were offered. All six do have named authors, which is better than we usually find. But independent is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The sourceWhat it actually is
The one we liked bestPresented to us as a drama school’s guidance
Reprint
A small private drama school in Brighton, reproducing a numbered list from a published American career book, with a heading above it saying exactly that. Two of our three headline ideas came off that page. Neither is theirs.
And another we called a drama schoolAn acting applicant guide
Not one
It is a state arts charity’s guide for a two-week residential summer course for high school students. Real, and useful in its place. Not a conservatoire.
A theatre education magazineNamed author, real credentials
Good
Published by a national theatre education association, written by a directing MFA who teaches at a New York college. The strongest of the six.
A casting platform’s editorialNamed, dated 2025
Good
A working actor and director who has written for them since 2013. Current, and the source of the best practical tip on this page.
A youth arts nonprofit and a listings siteBoth named, both dated
Fair
A regional youth performing arts charity, and a UK casting marketplace quoting two named working directors. Fine. Not institutions setting a standard.
A commercial coaching businessSells a course
Fair
Written by a trained working actor. Also a funnel to a paid membership.
So here is the honest version, and we think it is more interesting than the version we were going to publish. The active-not-narrative idea appears to trace largely to one named American author, whose list of common monologue mistakes includes almost word for word the advice everybody now gives, and whose text at least one drama school reprints wholesale. It is not a finding. It is a well-taught piece of craft tradition with a plausible single origin. That does not make it wrong. Most of what actors are taught works exactly like this. What it means is that we cannot offer six voices as proof, because they may be one voice with an echo — and this Academy has spent forty pages arguing that the number of people repeating something is not evidence.
What active actually means, and how to check
Active is a useless word until somebody makes it checkable. There is a test, it takes ten seconds, and it works on the first line.
The definition everybody uses: the character is trying to affect somebody, needs something from a person who is not there, and uses tactics to get it. It is happening now, not being remembered. Narrative speeches, by contrast, tend to open with something like “let me tell you about the day I…” or “my brother did…”
Probably narrativeProbably active
Opens by announcing a storyLet me tell you about
vs
Opens mid-argument. You have walked in on it.
Mostly past tenseIt happened, and then
vs
Mostly present tense. It is happening while they speak.
Explains a backgroundHere is who I am
vs
Demands a response. Somebody has to answer this.
Could be said to anybodyAn audience in general
vs
Is being said to one particular person, and you could name them.
Nothing has changed by the endOne note, held
vs
Something is won or lost. They finish somewhere they did not start.
And one institutional softening we are going to honour, because it comes from the most selective drama school in Britain and it disagrees with the American line. RADA’s own published advice lists
“active/reflective” as one axis of contrast between your two speeches — alongside dramatic and comic, serious and light.
It does not tell you to avoid reflective pieces. It treats reflective as a legitimate half of a pair. That is a school with an audition panel saying something more careful than the blogs. This is the test that catches most of
the sad speeches people bring in: grief is easy to describe and hard to aim at somebody.
So the rule is not that narrative is forbidden. It is that a speech which asks nothing of anybody has removed the thing you are being watched for. If both your pieces do that, you have a problem. If one of them is genuinely reflective and the other is not, you have a contrast.
Two related tests worth keeping. The panel must be able to follow it with no explanation from you — Central puts this in writing, asking for speeches where the situation is clear even to somebody who does not know the play. And you must still read the whole play. Those are compatible and worth saying together: you need to know it. They must not need to.
Two good pieces of advice that contradict each other
This is the most useful search tip we found all week. It is also the thing RADA specifically tells applicants not to do. Both are worth having and we are not going to pretend they agree.
The tip.
From a working actor writing for a casting platform: when you are skimming a script and your eye lands on a chunk of text that makes your brain go “monologue”, that chunk is probably not the most active part of the play. The real meat usually lies in the scenes.
The reasoning is sound. When two people are talking, they are usually trying to get something out of each other, which is precisely what makes text active. A block of uninterrupted speech is often the moment a playwright stopped the fight to explain something.
And here is RADA, in its own admissions document, on its list of things not to do: do not assemble a speech from lines of dialogue that depend heavily on another character’s interjections.
They are both right and the difference is craft. Lifting a run of one character’s lines out of a scene and taping them together produces something with holes in it — you can hear the missing replies, and the panel can hear you waiting. That is what RADA is warning against and they see it constantly. But using the scenes as your hunting ground, and finding a passage that genuinely stands alone once the other person stops talking, is a different act. Search in the scenes. Do not staple the scenes together. And if you cannot tell which one you have done, read it to somebody who does not know the play and watch their face.
One more from the same RADA list, and it should take some pressure off. Do not worry about how original your choice of speech is. A school that hears the same speeches every year is telling applicants directly that originality of choice is not what they are marking.
The most quoted number in this subject
It is the sharpest argument for keeping a speech short, it is genuinely striking, and we can no longer offer it as evidence.
The line is that every agent makes up their mind in under ten seconds — and that after two minutes they change their mind and it goes the other way. Going long, on this account, does not lose their attention. It reverses a decision that had already gone in your favour.
What we foundAnd what it does to the claim
The quote is realVerbatim in the article
Yes
We are not disputing that she said it. The article carries it accurately.
She was a coach, not an agentNor a casting director
Context
An Emmy-nominated actor who became a career coach selling audition and marketing coaching. The claim is her impression of what agents do, not a report from inside the room.
And she died in January 2022Four years ago
Undated
The interview carries no date. It cannot be dated more precisely than some time before the article existed.
The article is older than it looksBy roughly a decade
Masked
It carries a 2023 update stamp. Its position in the publisher’s own numbering places the original around 2014 or 2015 — earlier than pieces on the same site dated 2015 and 2016.
So we are keeping the idea and dropping the authority. The underlying point survives on its own legs: this Academy has found the same front-loading effect in four separate chapters, and every length figure in the field points the same way. What we will not do is put a decade-old undated anecdote from a coach in a box and call it a finding. The useful version has no numbers in it at all: a panel forms an impression early, and a long speech gives them time to reconsider it. That is worth acting on. It is not worth a statistic.
How long, and the number British readers have been getting wrong
The figure repeated everywhere online is American. If you are auditioning for a British drama school it is not the number you are working to, and following it costs you a third of your speech.
Where the figure comes fromWhat it says
The American trade pressUpdated December 2023
60–90s
Sixty to ninety seconds unless directed otherwise, and any longer and you will be hurting your chances.
A theatre education magazineAugust 2020
90s
No longer than a minute and a half, or about twenty to thirty lines — a line count is easier to check than a stopwatch.
RADA, Guildhall, the Royal Conservatoire, MountviewTheir own current documents
2 min
Two minutes per speech, stated as a hard ceiling, and RADA notes the panel may stop you if you run over.
LAMDAIts own current page
3 + 2
One speech up to three minutes, one up to two. The most generous in Britain.
So the answer depends entirely on where you are standing, and nobody says so. For a self-tape, sixty to ninety seconds is right and the American advice applies. For a British drama school audition the number is two minutes per speech, consistently, across every major school we checked — which means an actor trimming to ninety seconds because a website said so is handing back a quarter of their time. Two minutes is a ceiling rather than a target, and slightly under is always fine. But it is the ceiling you are working to. Check the school’s own page in the year you apply, because these move.
Should you cut a long speech down
One source says flatly no, and it is the same source we misattributed at the top of this page. We publish a whole chapter on how to cut a monologue. So we owe you the disagreement rather than a quiet omission.
The position, verbatim: do not cut that four-minute monologue you sometimes do down to two. More often than not you will cut the life, the muscle out of the monologue. Just find an appropriate two or three minute monologue that is suitable to the audition. And it adds a floor to the practice: if the breakdown says two minutes, do not bring anything that runs over four.
Two honest things about this. First, we went looking for a named coach, casting director or school taking the opposite view on the record, and we did not find one. That does not make the position consensus — almost nobody addresses the question at all, and none of the seven British schools mentions it. But it does mean our own cutting chapter is running against the only clearly sourced authority on the point, without a counterweight of equal standing. We would rather say that out loud than let the two pages sit on the same site pretending not to know about each other. Second, the two positions are compatible at different ratios. Trimming a fifth off is editing. Halving a speech is a rewrite, and the thing you rewrote is no longer the thing you liked. Cut lightly, or choose again.
Fitting you, rather than showing off
The most common mistake in choosing is picking the piece that proves you can act. The panel is not marking the writing.
The image worth keeping: a speech should fit like a comfortable pair of jeans. It should feel easy to say and easy to do, not like something you are managing. And the argument against picking to show range is blunt — however wonderful the writing, they want a piece that tells them something about you. Choosing material that stretches you appears on a published list of common mistakes.
A better organising idea than comedy and drama.
You might connect with Laura in The Glass Menagerie and with Antigone. With one you reach for shyness, love of family, an interior world. With the other, conviction, defiance and stubborn loyalty. They are nothing alike, and both are you.
That is a better principle for a pair of speeches than one funny and one sad, and it matches what the top schools ask for: different aspects of yourself, rather than a demonstration of variety.
Which leaves the tension everybody feels: pick the piece that scares you a little, but do not pick material that stretches you. Close enough to reach. Frightening enough to matter.
On matching the room, the advice is more concrete than it sounds. Auditioning for a British piece, do not bring the speech with the American accent. Choose something with real similarities to the part, so the panel does not have to do the imagining for you. Do a little reading on the writer and director. And above all, answer the brief. If they asked for Shakespeare, they are not hoping you will surprise them. For a professional casting audition rather than a school panel, the brief is a different shape again — picking a monologue for an audition covers it.
Whether you can choose a character of another gender
Two British schools answer this in writing on their own websites. Almost no actor knows it, because the question is usually treated as awkward rather than administrative.
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
PublishedIts speech list is sorted by the gender of the character as originally written — and it then says all candidates should feel free to choose speeches for either male or female characters.
Mountview
PublishedA standing line on the requirements for every acting course, attached to both speeches: may be in any gender.
The most selective American school
PublishedAsked directly whether you may choose a character of any gender identification, its own FAQ answers with a single word. Yes.
RADA, LAMDA, Guildhall, the Royal Conservatoire
What they sayNothing either way on their admissions pages. Silence is not a prohibition, but it does leave the applicant guessing.
And here is the gap, which we would rather name than fill with invention. Every permission above is written in male and female terms. None of them uses the words trans or non-binary in relation to choosing a speech. The main British casting directory does publish substantial, current guidance on trans and non-binary casting, developed with a specialist organisation — and it is about casting practice, breakdown language and pronouns. It says nothing at all about what you bring to an audition. Meanwhile the anthologies and the big monologue websites still sort everything into speeches for women and speeches for men, and we could find no public industry conversation about that. A community-run database of non-binary and trans characters exists and is a workaround, not a standard. So the practical position is: two schools have said yes in writing, most have said nothing, and nobody has written the guidance. If it matters to your choice, ask the school directly. That is a worse answer than we wanted and it is the true one.
Monologue or soliloquy, and a distinction we were about to overstate
There is a clean answer to the definition question, and then there is a clever point we were going to make on top of it that turns out not to be settled.
The working definition: a monologue is a speech delivered to other characters or the audience; a soliloquy is a character speaking aloud to themselves. Juliet at the window is a monologue. To be or not to be is a soliloquy. And for audition purposes it does not matter much, because casting use monologue as an umbrella term for any speech by one person, so a soliloquy is fine unless the brief says otherwise.
The clever point we are dropping. We were going to argue that a soliloquy is by definition not directed at anybody, that this makes it structurally narrative, and that this is why the most famous speech in English is a difficult audition piece. It is a tidy argument and the scholarship does not support it as settled. There is a substantial position that soliloquies were staged as direct address to the audience — that the audience is the other person — and a separate body of work arguing that they are genuinely dialogic, with the character treating the self as a real opponent. There is also a respectable position on the other side, which is why it is a live argument rather than a settled one. One of our own sources quietly assumes the audience reading, advising actors to work out which parts of a speech are direct address and which are not. So the honest version is smaller and more useful: decide who you are talking to, and then actually talk to them. A soliloquy played to nobody is inert. That is a choice you made, not a property of the form.
Grading the sources
The unanimity we were going to lead with turned out to be an echo, and the sharpest number in the subject came from someone who has been dead for four years.
The claim, and where it came fromWhat we found
Six independent sources agreeOur research, as the headline
Overstated
All named, which is better than usual — but the advice appears to trace largely to one published American coach, and one of the six is reprinting his book with a header saying so.
A drama school’s published guidanceHow we described one source
Wrong
It is a state arts charity’s applicant guide for a two-week summer course for high school students. Real, and not a conservatoire.
Two of our best lines are this school’sThe bedtime story, and the cutting dissent
Misattributed
Both are items six and seven of a numbered list from a published book, credited on the page above the text. We had the wrong author for our two best quotes.
Agents decide in ten seconds and reverse at two minutesOur sharpest number
Retired
Real quote, from a coach rather than an agent, who died in January 2022, in an article roughly a decade old behind a recent update stamp.
A soliloquy is by definition undirectedA tension we were going to publish
Not settled
Scholarship is genuinely split between audience address, self-address and flexible readings. We were about to state one side as fact.
RADA’s do and do not listIts own 2026 admissions document
Primary
Contrast on an active and reflective axis, one speech near your own age, do not worry about originality, and do not assemble from dialogue. Better than anything in our research.
Two minutes per speechFour schools’ own documents
Primary
Consistent and current, with LAMDA allowing three on one piece. Well above the American figure everybody repeats.
You may choose any genderTwo British schools, in writing
Primary
Quoted from their own live pages. Both framed in male and female terms, and neither mentions trans or non-binary actors.
The real meat is in the scenesA casting platform, September 2025
Good
Named working actor and director, writing there since 2013. Current, and it collides usefully with RADA’s warning.
Jeans, and Laura and AntigoneA theatre education association
Good
A directing MFA teaching at a New York college. The best-credentialed of the six and the least quoted.
Do not cut a long speech in halfThe same published coach
Unopposed
We could find nobody named taking the other side, and no school addresses it. That is not consensus, but our own cutting chapter has no equal-standing counterweight.
A reference file in our own folderCompiled alongside this research
Faulty
Its stated most important finding — that LAMDA bans self-written speeches — rests on a forum post and confuses the drama school with LAMDA’s separate children’s graded exams. Not used.
Where we differ from the standard account
Is active-not-narrative a proven rule?
Commonly saidEveryone in the industry agrees, so it must be right.
What we foundIt is well-taught craft tradition with a plausible single origin. Good advice. Not evidence.
Should you avoid reflective pieces?
Commonly saidNever do a narrative monologue.
What we foundRADA lists active and reflective as a contrast between your two speeches, not a right and a wrong one.
Where do you find a good speech?
Commonly saidIn the big obvious speeches.
What we foundUsually in the scenes. But do not staple dialogue together, which RADA warns against directly.
How long?
Commonly saidSixty to ninety seconds.
What we foundThat is the American self-tape figure. British drama schools allow two minutes per speech, and one allows three.
Does an original choice help?
Commonly saidFind something nobody has heard.
What we foundRADA tells applicants not to worry about it. What you do with the speech is what is being marked.
Should the piece show your range?
Commonly saidProve you can do everything.
What we foundChoosing material that stretches you is on a published list of mistakes. Pick the one that fits like old jeans.
Can you play a character of another gender?
Commonly saidNobody asks out loud.
What we foundTwo British schools and one American school publish yes. Most say nothing, and nobody has written the guidance for trans and non-binary actors.
Will the right monologue book you?
Commonly saidIt is the thing standing between you and the job.
What we foundIt rarely books anything. It gets you into a school, onto a shortlist, into a room. Then the rehearsal decides.
Do one thing tonight. Take the piece you are currently considering and read only its first two lines out loud. If they announce a story, put it down. If somebody in the room would have to answer you, you have found it — and the next hour is better spent rehearsing it than looking for a better one.
