Advice to a Player

While some of the thirty-two speeches included are well known for audition purposes, most are less familiar and so provide challenging new opportunities for an actor to grow. With all the chosen monologues, the author's aim is, in his own words, "to help the actor to establish a few base camps from which to scale the various mountains contained in...the work of this master playwright." He does this first by carefully analysing the meaning of each monologue as a whole and of various sentences and phrases within it. He goes on to explain point by point everything the actor needs to know about that moment in the play when the monologue is delivered.