Meet our graduates: Alistair Hall
MA Theatre Lab, 2019
I started acting shortly after my thirtieth birthday. I’d had experience with it when I was younger, but life happened and I spent my twenties working as a journalist. The desire to perform never went away though, it kept creeping up on me and so I listened to it.
Getting into RADA wasn’t something I thought would happen. It was the last drama school left for me to audition for and having been rejected by the others, I felt confused and exhausted. Luckily, the MA Theatre Lab way of doing things is totally unique. The audition was physical and alive, it was an invitation as opposed to an examination.
Frustrated with my classical or modern speeches, I asked if I could perform a speech I’d written. They said yes and I spent the session feeling more like myself than I had at any other audition. This sums up my experience of the course. It helped me discover the artist within. Not just Alistair the actor but Alistair the creator.
The course is intense but it’s fast pace and swirling mix of techniques has made me knowledgeable and fearless as a performer. It turned me from fragile to focussed and led me to create a one-person play. This was a fundamental tool in discovering the kind of character-driven work I like to write and perform and has been my launchpad into the industry.
Photo: Stanley Morgan
