Things to look while casting a play.

Things to look while casting a play.

In my experience, casting a theatre production is one of the easier bits of the pre-rehearsal process. You put the details on Spotlight, sift through thousands of applications, arrange a couple of audition days and at the end you pick the best team. I’m simplifying, but there are (unfortunately for performers) more people wanting the job than you have jobs to give. Let’s check to Things to look while casting a play.

Casting a community production is very different. Dark Earth has a large cast piece that I’m currently directing and it’s a thrill to have 37 parts to play with. Having spent much of my career working with casts of four or five. Crowd scenes can be genuine crowds. The possibilities for puppetry and music are greater. And I am freed of intricate Excel spreadsheets indicating who plays which part when.

This is a common problem on the amateur dramatics scene – never enough men! I’m not a prolific tweeter but faced with a lack of eligible gentlemen. I took to Twitter with all the enthusiasm you would throw at a new love affair! Hourly tweets with pleas for retweets from anyone and everyone. Then someone pointed out that given I was searching for men over 50, Twitter might not be reaching my target group.

I turned to the radio. BBC Radio Cambridge shire kindly agreed to interview me on their breakfast show, and while I attempted to squeeze in all the relevant details, the host was more interested in entertaining his listeners with the spy jokes than casting the production. Fair play, but I was still four men short.

Panic. We delayed the first read-through by a week in the hope of having at least the main characters in place. I remember Ivan Cutting, artistic director of Eastern Angles, telling me that it would be fine, that the cast would be our best ambassadors and people would come through. Frankly, I didn’t believe it.

The Sunday before the read-through I printed out a cast list. Two gaping blanks stared out at me accusingly. How could we be in this position when the project had been in the planning for so long? Should we have started recruiting earlier? It was a long night of fretful, interrupted sleep.

But what a difference a day makes. I checked my email the next morning. Keely have two men coming that evening, and two cast members have also bringing possible candidates. As our rehearsal venue filled up, my fear and trepidation began to melt away. I looked around at the 45+ people gathered in the room. Some had acted before: there was a Caliban, a Lancelot and John Proctor from the Mask Theatre’s production of The Crucible. For others, this would be their first experience of live theatre.

Many amateur theatre companies report a lack of young participants but I’m delighted to say this isn’t true with our cast – we’re now in the latter stages of rehearsal and 11 out of total 37 are under the age of 20. As well as the cast, nine girls from the local college want to be involved in making the costumes – it feels like a genuine community event. Oh, and I ended up offering the two remaining parts to the men who read them for the first time at the rehearsal venue that evening – both accepted.

That small exchange sums up all that’s good about recruiting community performers. Though reaching them might be difficult and securing their continued involvement a significant challenge, what they bring to a project in terms of life experience and expertise would be difficult for even the most accomplished actor to rival.