National Theatre Connections Monologues ─ Speeches for Young Actors

Always drawing together the work of 10 leading playwrights - a mixture of established and current writers - the annual National Theatre Connections anthologies offer young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study.

Each play is specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department and reflects the past year's programming at the venue in the plays' ideas, themes and styles. The plays are performed by approximately 200 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional regional theatres where the works are showcased.

For the first time, there is an anthology of monologues for young people available, taken from plays commissioned as part of the National Theatre Connections over the past 20 years. The monologues feature alongside a general introduction by the editor, Anthony Banks (Associate Director for the National Theatre Discover Programme). The volume also contains individual studies of each monologue with the editor's suggested points for discussion, a brief commentary about the play from which the speech is taken, as well as flagging potential performance decisions and offering up dramaturgical suggestions. Each page features one monologue, plus the individual commentary and some background to the play.

This anthology of monologues is the ideal resource for teenagers and young people attending auditions either in the amateur or professional theatre world; students leaving secondary school to audition for drama school; as well as teachers of English and Drama looking for suitable dramatic for their students to engage with and perform. It provides suitable scene-study books that are suitable and relevant to the student in terms of tone, style and content. Young actors who have searched for audition material written in the voice of teenage characters will welcome this resource.

With a foreword by actor Matt Smith.