At this time of year the perennial complaint always raises its head….audition fees! To be honest there are costs to institutions incurred by auditions, venue hire and the cost of an audition panel for a day being the key ones but do they have to charge so much? I think that they either forget or don’t care about the extra costs to an auditionee. Travel and accommodation can really mount up turning the £35-£50 audition fee into something north of £100! Also a lot of top Drama Schools are part of UCAS so you have to stump up £25 for that as well.

If you are walking in and out of the room in less than 5 minutes you would be forgiven if you felt shortchanged! Some places, like The Dorset School of Acting, turn the audition into a whole day affair or you get a more personal experience with a 1:1 audition for an hour. This way you can get a real sense of the school you are auditioning for. Sadly there are a lot of places that whip you in and out and then expect you to come back up to four times!

The bigger drama schools could actually charge a negligible amount per auditionee because of the sheer number of people who apply for their courses. The less well known schools, who have a much smaller amount of applicants, need to use the money to meet the cost of actually running an audition day.

There is no real answer for this dilemma because the top drama schools are going to make money from auditions as they are intrinsically businesses. If you think that some schools audition up to 5000 people with each auditionee paying up to £50 per audition, you can see that it is a big boost to the coffers! You can’t tell me that running auditions cost £250 000 per year!

The bottom line is that you need to choose carefully where you are going to spend your (or your parents) hard earned cash. Look at the smaller schools where you will get value for money for your audition, they may not be the ‘top’ drama schools but there are ones out there that are doing excellent work and getting students into the profession.

The Dorset School of Acting offer a 2yr accelerated diploma and a 1yr diploma course in Acting and Musical Theatre. Check out their courses here http://bit.ly/DSAfull