This is the first of two volumes in a series offering fresh audition pieces for actors at all levels - selected and commentated by a greatly experienced teacher and director.

As an actor at any level - from school exam to professional casting - you are called upon to perform one or more audition pieces - often one 'modern' and one 'classical'. A great deal will depend on your coming up with something fresh that is exactly suited to your particular performing skills. This is where the "Good Audition Guides" come in.

Drawing on her enormous experience in drama training - she sits on the selection board of several leading Drama Schools - Marina Caldarone has selected over forty-five monologues for men and another forty-five for women drawn from classical plays throughout the ages and ranging across all of Western theatre. Each piece is prefaced with a boxed information panel guiding readers towards the perfect piece for them.

These Classical monologues are presented chronologically and arranged within one of seven periods: Ancient Greece and Rome (Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus etc); Jacobethan (Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Webster etc); French/Spanish 'Golden Ages' (Moliere, Racine, Lope de Vega etc); Restoration (Aphra Behn, Wycherley, Farquhar etc); Naturalism (Ibsen, Chekhov etc); and turn of the Century (Wilde, Shaw etc).