That is what four two-minute audition monologues actually demand of an actor.

Over the past several weeks, I completed 13 hours of one-to-one online audition coaching with Lesley (name changed), a 19-year-old acting candidate preparing her repertoire for The Juilliard School.

When we first met on Zoom, Lesley already possessed wonderful emotional resonance and textual sensitivity. Yet she was experiencing a challenge I see constantly in young performers - especially when rehearsing on camera: the desomatisation of the actor. Even through a laptop screen, she was operating largely as a 'talking head'. Her voice carried feeling, but her body lacked the muscular engagement that audiences and audition panels recognise as presence and energy.

In Jacques Lecoq’s physical theatre pedagogy, this quality corresponds to the 'passion or anger' level of muscular tension. Far from uncontrolled emotion, it is a precise psychophysical state: an equal, active level of muscle tension distributed throughout the entire body, paired with clean starts and stops in movement. Most importantly, it is anchored in a clear objective - wanting something urgently, moving to get it, and sustaining that physical commitment without dropping tension until the objective is either achieved or decisively abandoned.

Much of our 13 hours together focused on building passionate physical scores from the ground up so that her body was driving the text rather than illustrating it. The one deliberate exception in her repertoire was Ophelia, which called for a different register - what Lecoq defines as the 'tragic' level of tension, where the body is held in a state of heightened, almost petrified crisis.

Toward the end of our coaching, we watched professional actors perform her two Shakespeare monologues on the National Theatre's and The Globe's YouTube channels. Seeing those performances side by side with her own work clicked everything into place. Lesley immediately recognised why our entire process had centred on crafting clear, high-stakes physical scores rather than simply polishing vocal delivery.

Watching her step into that physical commitment also made me reflect on the sheer bodily joy of those eight minutes of intense living - and what it means outside of performance. It highlights why the bodily intensity of performance itself is deeply cathartic, not only within the industry, but in our everyday lives whenever we put our full bodies into motion: the unmistakable feeling of aliveness when we leave the gym, the beach, the sports pitch, or the nightclub.

Four monologues at two minutes each is not just eight minutes of polished performance. It is eight minutes of living intensely - and I hope Lesley takes that forward in her life. After all, what if every minute were lived like that? Wouldn't every minute be lived fully?