Whether you're applying for drama school, taking an exam, or auditioning for a professional role, it's likely you'll be required to perform one or more monologues, including a piece from a contemporary play. It's vital to come up with something fresh that's suited both to you – in order to allow you to express who you are as a performer – and to the specific purposes of the audition.

In this book, you'll find forty fantastic speeches featuring male roles, all written and premiered since the year 2014, by some of today's most exciting dramatic voices from the UK and USA.

Playwrights include Annie Baker, Andrew Bovell, Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Mark Gatiss, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Anna Jordan, Arinzé Kene, Rona Munro and Evan Placey. The plays featured were premiered at leading venues including the National, the Royal Court, the Bush and Hampstead in London, prestigious theatres in Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester, and by renowned companies including Frantic Assembly and Paines Plough.

Drawing on her experience as an actor, director and teacher at several leading drama schools, Trilby James introduces each speech with a user-friendly, bullet-point list of essential things you need to know about the character, and then five inspiring ideas to help you perform the monologue.

This book also features a step-by-step guide to the process of selecting and preparing your speech, and approaching the audition itself.

'Easy-to-use… The guidance is perhaps the most thorough I have seen in a monologue book' Teaching Drama on Trilby James's first volume of Contemporary Monologues

Please note that some of the speeches in this volume contain strong language and themes which some readers may find inappropriate.