The Stage Scholarships: Get a degree with Fourth Monkey

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This year Fourth Monkey Actor Training Company has had its two-year training programme validated to degree level. Founder and artistic director Steven Green tells Paul Vale about what it is looking for from applicants

This year, the Fourth Monkey Actor Training Company celebrates its 10th anniversary and with it, the accreditation of its unique, two-year vocational training programme to BA status, validated by Falmouth University.

Once again, The Stage is partnering with Fourth Monkey, offering two half-scholarships for this BA (hons) Acting two-year accelerated degree, valued at approximately £22,200.

Fourth Monkey founder and artistic director Steven Green sheds some light on the ethos behind its training.

“The core principles that set Fourth Monkey apart from the traditional routes of training would be that the focus is very much on making not just actors, but theatremakers too. So our hashtag, as it were, is: act, make, move and collaborate. That is the way we work. It’s very much an ensemble environment.”

Variety and the opportunity to perform was a major attractions to last year’s winner of The Stage Scholarship Hannah Roy-Davies, aged 20 from Greenwich.

“At the end of our first year, we have a showcase. Then, we go to Italy for the residential commedia dell’arte course with Antonio Fava. After that, we have five seasons in our second year. We have our Camden Fringe, Shakespeare Season, Contemporary Season and then we have an American play project as well, and experimental, fringe, all different,” she says.

The course is an intense programme, fitting three years’ training into a two-year, completely vocational programme. Tuition and practice are geared towards a traditional trajectory but graduates will, more often than not, collaborate with a theatre company and make their own work when they finish. With this in mind, the training has four strands including acting, movement, voice and devising/creating.

“Those four strands are equally balanced pretty much throughout the training pedagogy,” explains Green. “We do everything, Stanislavski right through, but our main training principal is underpinned by a Meisner philosophy.”

There are also opportunities to gain a bursary for Fourth Monkey’s Experimental Fringe Project – the company has a long association with the Camden Fringe. Professional and paid employment is an option, with its professional company, the Fourth Monkey Ensemble. There is continued professional career development, maintenance and guidance through masterclasses and workshops on Fourth Monkey’s Evolve programme following graduation.

So what is Fourth Monkey looking for in its scholarship applicants? “Ideally a good ensemble member,” Green reiterates. “We are looking for someone who’s going to be a team player. Someone who wants to make work, as well as be an actor. Someone who has an interest in the process of creating as opposed to someone who is spangled by starlight. Our audition is a full-on day. There are speeches, reworking and an interview, but there is also a sequence of workshops throughout the course of any audition day – so from movement and voice, to devising. We do some clown work and some ensemble work. So we see them in seven or eight different contexts throughout the course of a pretty jam-packed day. They get a good sense of what a standard day at Monkey is, as opposed to what an audition is.”

For more information go to: fourthmonkey.co.uk