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You don’t have to be the finished article, but you definitely have to show something different, a spark or something they see in you that can be moulded. I think they liked my creativity and the fact that I had lots of ideas, even if I didn’t quite know how to execute them yet. What was your Guildhall experience like? At first, we spent our time unpicking any bad habits we had developed. For the first year we basically dealt with no text whatsoever. In effect it became the Guildhall School of Unlearning! Often it was a simple thing like standing up straight because I’m so tall. I think I had walked with a stoop for so long that I stopped noticing it and then my movement teachers asked me why I was diminishing myself. “Instead of bringing you down to people let people come up to you!” In the second year, you start getting into the classic texts - Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare - they’re the most difficult texts to perform well. We spent a lot of time learning to portray characters with multiple agendas, some of which may be mundane such as pouring coffee from a samovar while dealing with much more complex emotional issues such as adultery, bribery, fraud. There was a real belief that if you could convey meaning from texts with long monologues and subtle undercurrents, you could cope with anything. By the time I reached the third year, I had certainly become more confident, and I realised that I really wanted to become someone who can tell interesting stories through their own work rather than relying on that of others. I guess that’s when I thought I might try to write for myself. To what extent was the final year different from the first two? It was weird, because as soon as you’re in your third year people start going for auditions and that can quite quickly affect the whole dynamic of the year. It almost felt like fault lines were being created between those who were always away reading for this part or that part and those who felt they were getting left behind. I was lucky that I got a role at the Orange Tree Theatre. So you have all these thoughts and you’re ready to take on the world now. You have a job which you love and then there comes that moment when suddenly you're not working. Do you worry that you might never work again? Absolutely. And then there's the question of what makes me an actor. Is it because I’ve trained for it or because I earn my rent from it? Or is it simply because I call myself one? How do you deal with the self-doubt, which must really weigh on you at times? No matter which profession you’re in, you’re always going to have doubts and worries. It’s perfectly normal. I just accept it as part of the journey. I do think though that you need to have a quiet certainty and a clear idea of what success looks like. Then you can reflect positively about what you’ve achieved or are achieving. You also need a good support system for both the good times and the low moments. Can you give some examples of any productions you’ve been in? Everything from the work of which you’re most proud through to the roles you took just to pay the rent!
Can I take you back to when you were at the College? When and how did you find that you had a talent for acting? And what was your experience while you were there? I clearly remember going to the Field Centre in South Wales at the beginning of Year 7, and on one evening we had to get into groups and put on mini plays. Afterwards, Miss Jarman took me aside and said, “That was brilliant, you really committed to your character”. And I think it just stuck in my mind that it was something I wanted to keep going. Later, it was Peter Jolly (72- 80) and Kathryn Norton-Smith (Head of Academic Drama) and their encouragement of physical theatre that really inspired me, particularly when I was encouraged to audition for a part in the Pleasance Theatre Company’s production of Teechers (by John Godber) which was being taken to the Edinburgh Fringe. I was only fifteen or sixteen at the time and it was the first time that I had to go for a formal audition. Having got the part, I loved everything about the process, from the rehearsals to performing the same part every night for a month and being able to make subtle yet important changes to the character over the course of the run. I got a real thrill from being in front of an audience that I had been in Islington all day for the Teechers audition and, as I left the theatre to come home, I got stabbed with a screwdriver. I was rushed to hospital with a punctured lung. Looking back, it was a pivotal moment as it helped me to make up my mind about taking acting seriously. For some reason, on one of his visits to the hospital, my dad was talking to me about what I was going to study at university. I got really quite upset as I realised that I didn’t have a subject I could study. I think a lot of young people worry about what they’re going to do once they leave school. After I left the hospital and I did this Edinburgh show, I came back thinking I do have a subject now and I know what I want to do with my life. Did you do Drama as an A-level? I did it as an A-level right after that summer in Edinburgh. It quickly became obvious to me that I had made the right decision. And that's when I met a director called Ned Bennett (95-02) who had been at both the National Theatre and the Orange Tree Theatre amongst others. When we did Of Mice and Men with him, he started including all these incredible techniques that he had learnt at drama school. I began to see that there are many ways in which you can be even more truthful, allow yourself to tell a story better and create more rounded and fuller characters. When did you start thinking seriously that acting could be a career? It was then that I really thought about making a career out of acting and Mr Jolly pointed me to Drama school. I applied to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is insanely competitive to get into and I had to go through three really challenging auditions; the final one lasted an entire day. You’re seen by all the teachers in the school and every one of them has to put a tick by your name before you get accepted onto the course. were laughing and clearly enjoying themselves. You were lucky to even get to Edinburgh though.
Dan Whitlam (08-13) reflects on his earliest experiences of acting while at the College, his time at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and a subsequent career which has seen him take on a variety of roles on both stage and screen. He speaks passionately about finding his voice with poetry and the resulting work, which treads the line between traditional prose, rhyme, rhythmic speech and street vernacular. DAN WHITLAM
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