Which Macbeth speech should you audition with?

Most people choose an audition speech by remembering one. That is how six people in a row do “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” and how the panel stops listening somewhere in the second one.

There are better grounds to choose on, and they are boring and practical: how long the speech runs, how much of the play you have to explain before it makes sense, and how many times the person opposite you has heard it this month. A speech that needs no set-up and runs ninety seconds will serve you better than a famous one you have to introduce.

Six candidates below. Every line count is a real count off a lineated text, not an estimate, and every one links straight into its scene so you can hear it before you commit to it.

The six, side by side

Read the lengths as time using about three seconds a line, which is a slow-ish speaking pace for verse. Twelve lines is roughly thirty-five seconds. Twenty-nine lines is roughly ninety, which is the top of what most panels want from one speech.

Speech	Scene	Length	Set-up needed	How often they hear it
If it were done when ‘tis done	I.vii	28 lines	Low	Occasionally
Is this a dagger which I see before me	II.i	29 lines	Low	Constantly
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow	V.v	12 lines	One line of it	Constantly
The raven himself is hoarse	I.v	17 lines	Low	Constantly
Out, damned spot	V.i	162 words of prose	High	Often
Two truths are told	I.iii	16 lines	High	Rarely

The set-up column is the one people ignore and then lose the room to. It is not about whether the panel knows the play - they know the play. It is about whether the speech has to borrow information from outside itself before the first thirty seconds mean anything. A speech that carries its own situation starts working immediately. A speech that does not spends its opening explaining, and you cannot act an explanation.

If it were done when ‘tis done

Act I, Scene VII. Twenty-eight lines, and the most underrated of the six.

It carries its own situation completely: within a dozen lines it has told you that the man is a kinsman, a subject and a host, that the guest is a king, and what is about to happen to him. Nobody has to know anything. It is also a genuine argument rather than a mood - he lists reasons not to do it and then, at the end, admits that none of them is the reason he might not.

Cut it if you need to. It ends on a broken line, “And falls on th’ other”, where Lady Macbeth comes in, and stopping there gives you an ending that is not a full stop, which reads as a person interrupted by himself.

Choose this one if you want to be judged on thinking rather than on atmosphere.

Is this a dagger which I see before me

Act II, Scene I. Twenty-nine lines, the longest here, and the most technically demanding for a reason that has nothing to do with the verse.

It is a speech to an object that is not there. In a rehearsal room with a director you would work out where the dagger is, how it moves, what your hands do. In a fifteen-minute audition slot, with a panel two metres away behind a table, you have to make all of that up in advance and commit to it, and if you have not, your eyes drift and the whole thing goes vague.

Everything else about it is easy. No set-up: “the bloody business” and “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” tell the panel what is happening. It is also the one on this list that most rewards being still.

Choose it if you have already solved the imaginary object. Do not choose it to solve it in the room.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Act V, Scene V. Twelve lines, counting from “She should have died hereafter”, which is where you should start.

The shortest speech here by a distance and the one you should think hardest about. It needs exactly one piece of set-up, and it is contained in the first line: his wife has just died. That is all a panel needs. The rest is a man discovering that nothing means anything, and it is twelve lines long.

The problem is not the speech. The problem is that everyone knows it, and everyone has an opinion about how it goes. The panel will be comparing you to a recording in their head before you finish the first line. It also has almost no action in it: nobody is doing anything to anybody, which makes it hard to play as anything other than sad.

If you use it, use it as your second piece, not your first, and do not slow it down. Every person who has ever ruined it slowed it down.

The raven himself is hoarse

Act I, Scene V. Seventeen lines, running from “The raven himself is hoarse” through “Come, you spirits” to “Hold, hold!”.

The strongest of the six in the room, on balance. It is short enough to keep, it is an act rather than a reflection - she is doing something, out loud, with intent - and it carries its own set-up in the first two lines: the raven is announcing Duncan’s arrival at her house.

It also has a shape. It starts as a statement about a bird and ends as an invocation with an audience of spirits, and it climbs the whole way. A speech that goes somewhere is easier to be good in than a speech that stays.

The catch: it is heard a lot, and it is heard badly. There is a way of doing it that is all witch and no woman, and a panel that has sat through four of those will be relieved by anybody who plays it as somebody deliberately talking herself into something.

Out, damned spot

Act V, Scene I. A hundred and sixty-two words of prose, and this is the one with a structural problem you need to know about before you fall in love with it.

It is not a speech. In the scene it is six short bursts, interrupted by the Doctor and the Gentlewoman watching her, and there is no continuous passage in it longer than about sixty words. To use it as an audition piece you have to stitch the bursts together, which changes what it is: the original is a woman being observed, and the stitched version is a woman speaking.

It is also prose, not verse, and it is prose for a reason. The verse has gone because her mind has, and you cannot lean on the line to organise you.

And it needs the whole play. “The Thane of Fife had a wife” and “Banquo’s buried” mean nothing unless the listener supplies four acts.

None of that makes it a bad choice. It makes it a choice for somebody who has decided how to handle the joins and can hold a scene together without a metre under it.

Two truths are told

Act I, Scene III. Sixteen lines, and the least used of the six, which is its main argument.

This is the aside where the whole play starts: the witches have just been right about Cawdor, and he goes from “cannot be ill” to imagining a murder inside one speech, and frightens himself doing it. Nobody hears this one. If you can make the panel follow the turn, it shows more than “Tomorrow” ever will.

Two warnings. It needs real set-up - the prophecy, the title, who is standing there - and the speech does not supply it. And it is an aside embedded in a scene: he breaks out of it midway to say “I thank you, gentlemen” to the men around him, so you either cut that or you play two audiences at once, and the second is harder than it looks.

Choose it if your set-up sentence is good and you can say it in one breath before you start.

If you have to pick one

For most auditions, the raven speech or If it were done. They are the two that need no introduction, run the right length, contain an action rather than a mood, and are not the ones the panel is mouthing along to.

If you need a short second piece, Tomorrow, played fast.

If you want to be remembered, Two truths are told, and spend your preparation on the one sentence you say before it starts.

Whichever you take, the way to find out is to say it against the scene it comes out of rather than alone in a room. Open the scene, choose the part, and press Rehearse: it reads every other role aloud and listens while you say yours. It asks for the microphone at that point and not before.