Monologue Collection
It’s so hard to find good monologues nowadays - ones that are unique, not overdone, and powerful. And so I present to you my personal monologue collection - many of which I have used in auditions and have successfully been cast because of these monologues.
Of course, any monologue requires work on the actor’s part to bring it to life - but having good material to work with is half the job!
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Classical Monologues
Miss Julie
You think I can’t stand the sight of blood? You think I’m weak? I tell you, I’d like to see your blood, your brains on that block – see all your sex in a sea of blood – I could drink out of your skull, I’d wash my feet in your ribcage, eat your heart fried! – you think I’m weak, you think I love you, just because my body lusted for your seed? You think I want to carry your offspring under my heart, nourish it with my blood, bear your children, take your name – what is your surname, by the way? I’ve never heard it – maybe you’ve got one, I’d be Mrs Gatehouse – or Madam Rubbish Heap —you’re a dog who wears my collar, you’re a menial with my family crest on your buttons – me, sharing with my kitchen maid, the rival of my own servant girl? No, no, no – you think I’m a coward who wants to run? No, I’ve decided, I’m staying, so let the storm break! My father will come home, find his desk broken in to, his money gone! Then he’ll ring the bell – that bell – two rings for his valet – then he’ll send for the police and I’ll confess all of it, everything. And then Father will have a stroke and die and that will be the end of all of us and we will have peace, calm, eternal rest! And our coat of arms smashed against the coffin – the Earl’s line extinct – and the valet’s line carried on in an orphanage, it’ll win its spurs in the gutter and end up in prison!
(Julie)
by August Strindberg
Dramatic
Age 20-30s
A Woman of No Importance
We are trying to build up life, Lady Hunstanton, in a better, truer, purer basis than life rests on here. This sounds strange to you all, no doubt. How could it sound other than strange? You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh snd the simple and pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, snd if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how to live - you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life’s secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.
(Hester)
by Oscar Wilde
Dramatic
Age 15-20
Marriage
Honestly, this choosing business is so difficult. If there were just one or two, but four! Take your pick. Mr Anuchkin isn’t bad-looking, but he’s a bit skinny, of course. And Mr Podkolyosin isn’t too bad, either. And truth to tell, though he’s rather stout, Mr Omelet’s still a fine figure of a man. So what am I to do, if you please? Mr Zhevakin’s also a man of distinction. It really is difficult to decide, you can’t begin to describe it. Now, if you could attach Mr Anuchkin’s lips to Mr Podkolyosin’s nose, and take some of Mr Zhevakin’s easy manner, and perhaps add Mr Omelet’s solid build, I could decide on the spot. But now I’ve got to rack my brains! And it’s giving me a fearsome headache. I think it’d be best to draw lots. Turn the whole matter over to God’s will, and whichever one comes out, that’ll be my husband. I’ll write all their names on a bit of paper, roll them up tight, then so be it. (She goes to her desk, gets some paper and writes the names on them.) Life’s so trying for a girl, especially when she’s in love. It’s something no man will ever understand, and anyway they just don’t want to. Now, that’s them ready! All that remains is to put them in my purse, shut my eyes, and that’s it – what will be, will be. (She places papers in her purse and give it a shake.) This is dreadful… oh God, please make it Anuchkin! No, why him? Better Mr Podkolyosin. But why Mr Podkolyosin? In what way are the others worse? No, no, I won’t… whichever comes out, so be it. (She rummages in her purse and pulls them all out instead of one.) Oh! All of them! They’ve all come out! And my heart’s pounding. No, no, it’s got to be one! (She puts the papers back in her purse.) Oh, if only I could draw out Baltazar… no, what am I saying? I mean Mr Anuchkin…no, I won’t, I won’t. Let fate decide.
(Agafya)
by Nikolai Gogol
Comedic
Age 15-20s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Call you me fair? That “fair” again unsay.
Demetrius loves your fair, O happy fair!
Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue's sweet air
More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.
Sickness is catching. O, were favor so!
Your words I catch, fair Hermia. Ere I go,
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody.
Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I'd give to be to you translated.
O, teach me how you look, and with what art
You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.
Act I Scene 1
(Helena)
by William Shakespeare
Comedic
Age 15-20s
Taming of the Shrew
No shame but mine; I must forsooth, be forc’d
To give my hand, opposed against my heart,
Unto a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen,
Who woo’d in haste and means to wed at leisure.
I told you, I, he was a frantic fool,
Hiding his bitter jests in blunt behavior;
And, to be noted for a merry man,
He’ll woo a thousand, ‘point the day of marriage,
Make friends invited, and proclaim the banns;
Yet never means to wed where he hath woo’d.
Now must the world point at poor Katherine,
And say ‘Lo, there is mad Petruchio’s wife,
If it would please him come and marry her!’
Act III Scene 2
(Katherine)
by William Shakespeare
Comedic
Age 15-20s
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Contemporary Monologues
A Little Night Music
Your son was right at dinner. We don’t fool that boy, not for a moment. The One and Only Desiree Armfeldt, dragging around the country in shoddy tours, carrying on with someone else’s dimwitted husband. And the Great Lawyer Egerman, busy renewing his unrenewable youth. Shall I tell you why I really invited you here? When we met again and we made love, I thought: Maybe here it is at last – a chance to turn back, to find some sort of coherent existence after so many years of muddle. Of course, there’s your wife. But I thought: Perhaps – just perhaps – you might be in need of rescue, too
(Desiree)
by Hugh Wheeler
Dramatic
Age 30s - 40s
Proof
I lived with him. I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there . . . Watched him shuffling around like a ghost. A very smelly ghost. He was filthy. I had to make sure he bathed. My own father . . .
After my mother died it was just me here. I tried to keep him happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: he believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code . . .
Beautiful mathematics. The most elegant proofs, perfect proofs, proofs like music . . . Plus fashion tips, knock-knock jokes – I mean it was nuts, OK? Later the writing phase: scribbling nineteen, twenty hours a day . . . I ordered him a case of notebooks and he used every one. I dropped out of school . . . I’m glad he’s dead.
(Catherine)
by David Auburn
Dramatic
Age 20s-30s
Summer and Smoke
I don’t want to be talked to like some incurably sick patient you have to comfort. Oh, I suppose I am sick, one of those weak and divided people who slip like shadows among you solid strong ones.
But sometimes, out of necessity, we shadowy people take on a strength of our own. I have that now.
You needn’t try to deceive me. You needn’t try to comfort me. I haven’t come here on any but equal terms. You said, let’s talk truthfully, even shamelessly, then!
It’s no longer a secret that I love you. It never was.
I loved you as long ago as the time I asked you to read the stone angel’s with your fingers. Yes, I remember the long afternoons of our childhood, when I had to stay indoors to practice my music—and hear your playmates calling you, “Johnny, Johnny!” How it went through me, just to hear your name called!
(Alma)
by Tennessee Williams
Dramatic
Age 15-20
Lovechild
You made sure! You! What was it you made sure of, exactly? Where were you? What did you secure for me? You have no idea! You wouldn’t know the first thing about what was good for me, what I had, or missed, or lost! There are all kinds of liberties I might have had if my parents had been of my blood. I could have hated them and bitched about them and left and come back and left, I could have betrayed them and abandoned them and returned and fought – all those privileges of a blood connection. I could have pushed to be free of them because I would have known that I could never be free. We would have been blood. Temper or whim or anger – nothing could have budged that one fact. If it’s not a blood tie, nothing’s dependable. All those shifts of feeling are so much more dangerous, because there is nothing to stop you from walking away. There is nothing … biological … to beckon you back. That’s a big strain to live with. Somewhere good manners came into it. I couldn’t be a real child, because I might hurt them and frighten them and frighten myself. So don’t tell me you ‘looked into them’. You didn’t look anywhere. You didn’t know anything.
(Billie)
by Joanna Murray-Smith
Dramatic
Age 20s-30s
Enigma
No—it happened to me. It didn't happen to you. You made up your mind and walked in, with the air of a god on a holiday. It was I who fell—headlong, dizzy, blind. I didn't want to love you. It was a force too strong for me. It swept me into your arms. I prayed against it. I had to give myself to you, even though I knew you hardly cared. I had to—for my heart was no longer in my own breast. It was in your hands, to do what you liked with. You could have thrown it in the dust. It pleased you not to. You put it in your pocket. But don't you realize what it is to feel that another person has absolute power over you? No, for you have never felt that way. You have never been utterly dependent on another person for happiness. I was utterly dependent on you. It humiliated me, angered me. I rebelled against it, but it was no use. You see, my dear, I was in love with you. And you were free, and your heart was your own, and nobody could hurt you.
(She)
by Floyd Dell
Dramatic
Any Age
The Seed
I will never have children. I will never have children. I will never have children. And you know what? I don’t think I deserve them anyway.When a friend tells me she is pregnant I smile and hug and kiss and ask her dumb questions. ‘How far along?’ ‘Any names picked yet?’ ‘What are you craving?’ But I don’t let on what I’m craving. That despite my big smile and congratulations I’m green and I’m bubbling and I’m thinking, you bitch, I hope it fucking dies inside you, you bitch. And when a pregnant woman walks past me on the street I want punch her belly and walk away when she falls to the ground and just leave her there to deal with it. And when a husband tells me he’s having his third boy I want to put my hand down his pants and rip his fucking cock off and squeeze it dry of any seed. And when I see a baby in a pram… I just want to pick it up and smell its skin and hold it to my heart and stroke its little head and never let another person touch it for the rest of its life.
(Rose)
by Kate Mulvaney
Dramatic
Age 20s-30s
A Little Night Music
How do you rate your husband as a man? I shall give you an example. As a man, my husband could be rated as a louse, a bastard, a conceited, puffed-up, adulterous egomaniac. He constantly makes me do the most degrading, the most humiliating things like… like… like… Oh, why do I put up with it? Why do I let him treat me like – like an intimidated corporal in his regiment? Why? Why? Why? I’ll tell you why. I despise him! I hate him! I love him! Oh, damn that Desiree Armfeldt! May she rot forever in some infernal dressing room with lipstick of fire and scalding mascara!
(Charlotte)
by Hugh Wheeler
Comedic
Age 20s-30s
When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream and Shout
Listen, will you. If I’m pregnant it’ll ruin four people’s lives. Five. Right? My Mum’ll be disappointed and her man’ll walk out on her. That’s two. Are you with me, God? I’ll not be very happy. My mother’ll hate me for the rest of my life for what I’ve done and that’s not easy to live with. That’s three. I’m still counting, God. Ewan’ll be in for it. Well, he can’t avoid it. I’m illegal and I’ve never been out with anybody else. Not that nobody fancied me. I wouldn’t like to think I was unpopular. Lots of people fancied me. My mum said I had to wait till I was sixteen. Then she relented just when Ewan happened to be there. Poor old Ewan. That’s four, God, that’s four. Then there’s the baby. If it’s there and if I have it it’s got no chance. It would be born in Scotland. Still there, are you? I hate Scotland. I mean, look at me. If I have an abortion the baby’ll be dead so that’ll be five anyway.
(Fiona)
by Sharman MacDonald
Comedic
Age 20s-30s