How To Tips for Actor Sight Reading | Cold Reading in Auditions

[@jackhaggerty1066]

I am neither actor nor writer, but I often read new poetry and prose passages aloud, and after a time the eye & brain get good at it. Of course I am only reading for myself. So your video will be most appreciated Decades ago at church the priest asked me to read one of Paul's epistles and I could hear how dreadful I sounded as I recited the passage.

[@lmccoachinguk]

I'm so glad you found the video helpful. It can be really nerve wracking reading text aloud. Reading poetry out loud can be great fun because theres so much to play with in the words and imagery.

[@jackhaggerty1066]

@@lmccoachinguk Reading poetry aloud should be encouraged in schools, L.Mc. So much fun, as you say. *Poems by P.J. Kavanagh. The Poetry Archive* online. He wrote a famous memoir *The Perfect Stranger* which I recommend. After the death of his young wife Sally (the daughter of Rosamond Lehmann) Kavanagh became an actor at the Old Vic. I interviewed him at his home near Cirencester; he is in Lawrence of Arabia, a young subaltern introducing O'Toole to Jack Hawkins. Over a pint in the Green Dragon he told me he had never seen the movie; by then he was married again with two little boys he adored. I heard him read his poem *Edward Thomas in Heaven* at Cheltenham Literary Festival : his own reading caught the poem's wit. In *Something About* (Poetry Archive) I heard the poem's mystery which only his voice catches; it gave me an agreeable shiver. I am a Glaswegian who loves the theatre; during lockdown I watched the Globe productions on DVDs, absolutely wonderful. I recommend the DVD box set *Playing Shakespeare - John Barton* some of which is available on KZbin. Barton was a magus ! John Windsor-Cunningham's talks on acting (KZbin) are also worth watching; an English actor now resident in New York. My memories of P.J. Kavanagh are on a blog, *Britain is no Country for Old Men:; I interviewed the poet when I edited Glasgow University Magazine in the 1970s. My friend James Campbell (the biographer of James Baldwin) writes of that period in his memoir *Just Go Down to the Road* published by Polygon in 2022.