How to learn lines for a play, a film, or an audition

The script comes in on a Thursday. Rehearsals start in ten days, or the tape is due Monday, or the callback is tomorrow at eleven. You read it once at the kitchen table and feel two things at once: this is a good part, and I have no idea how it is going to get into my head. And there is nobody in the flat to run it with.

That is where most actors start. On a sofa, alone, with a deadline. This is a guide to learning lines from that position: for a play, for a film or a selftape, for an audition that came in last night, and for a script that is not in your first language.

One thing about the words first. Actors say learn lines, get off book, learn the part. Memorize is the word people use when they have not done it much, and it points you at the wrong job. You are not filing text. You are learning a conversation from one side of it.

Learn lines by yourself, out loud, on your feet

Reading the script silently on the sofa is not learning lines. It feels like it. The page gets familiar, and your brain reports familiar back to you as known. Then you stand up in the room and the line is not there, because you never once produced it.

So the whole method comes down to one move: take the words away and say them anyway. Out loud, standing up. Cover your line, read the cue, say your line into the room, then check. Mark where you were wrong and go back to the marks.

Do the scene work before you drill. Know what your character wants, and what they are doing with each line to get it. Write a verb next to the beats: convince, deflect, retreat. Lines that hang on a verb go in faster and come out more flexible. Lines drilled as sound come out one way, at one speed, and they break the first time a director gives you an adjustment.

Then learn the cues. Your lines are half of what there is to learn; the other half is the words that trigger them. Rehearse silently and you skip past the other character's dialogue, so in the room your lines come out of nowhere. They need to come out of something a person just said, which is why actors have always needed someone to run lines with.

The technique in full, including the test that tells you when you are actually off book, is in how to learn lines and actually memorize them.

An app to learn lines for a play

For most of my career the someone was a girlfriend, a flatmate, or a castmate I owed a favour. They were generous. They were also asleep at midnight, or counting the pages by the fourth pass. I built the thing I wanted instead.

blablabla is an app for learning lines: you import the script, choose your part, and it speaks every other character's lines while it waits for yours. It is the best app for learning lines for a play or a film when you want the scene to wait for you instead of the other way round.

The waiting is what matters. A recording of the other lines runs at one speed, so you fit your performance around a fixed track. blablabla stops on your cue and stays stopped until you have said your line, however long that takes. It does not move until you do.

Import works from a PDF, a Word file, Fountain, Final Draft, a photo of paper sides, or pasted text. Each character gets a distinct voice. A dial sets how much of your own line you can see: the full text, a hint, the first letter of every word, or nothing. That last one is the old first-letter drill with a voice for the cue instead of the page. Once the audio is cached it works offline, on iPhone, iPad and Android.

You can listen to the whole scene spoken, read it before you have picked a part, practice it with your whole line on screen, a hint, the first letters or nothing at all, or record a selftape with it reading off camera. The rest is on the features page, and the practice library has free scenes to try it on before you trust it with your audition.

Learn lines fast without cramming

Sometimes the problem is not the scene. It is Tuesday, the tape is due Thursday, and you have four hours to give it. Fast is fine. Cramming is the mistake: rereading the page until three in the morning and calling the familiarity knowledge. Fast is doing the right drills in the right order and then going to bed.

The order: understand the scene first, even if that costs twenty minutes you feel you cannot spare. Then generate, do not reread. Cover the page and produce the line. Write the speech out as initials and recite from those. Run the join, their last sentence and your first, ten or fifteen times as one unit. Then a full pass out loud with the other parts spoken, and sleep. The last pass before bed does more than the same pass at noon.

What speed costs you is flexibility. Buy it back by running the scene twice more with the intention changed on purpose, and by getting the cues thrown at you out of order.

The drills, with the evidence behind each one, are in how to learn lines fast. For a two-day window there is an hour by hour version in how to get off book in 48 hours.

Why actors forget lines (and what fixes it)

Everyone dries. The useful question is which kind of forgetting it was.

The most common one is a broken join. You know the words. Nothing makes them start, because the cue never went in while you were busy being about to talk. Work out what the other character wants from you when they say the cue, in a phrase you could say out loud, then run the pair together until it welds.

The second kind is a chain that snapped. Lines learned as sound sit in a sequence where each word cues the next, so when one word goes, the page goes with it. Know the scene as five moves rather than ninety words and a stumble costs a sentence instead of the speech.

The third kind is nerves. The words were there in the kitchen and gone the moment a person was watching. That is not a memory problem and drilling does not touch it. The only rehearsal for it is doing the scene in front of someone who will not stop when you stop.

And occasionally the method never fitted the brain. If lines have never gone in the way the books say they should, how to learn lines with ADHD or dyslexia is about changing the method.

Learning lines for an audition you got last night

Sides at 11:43 PM, audition at noon. The playbook changes, and sleep is now the biggest item on it.

Ninety minutes tonight. Read the scene twice, no highlighting. Break it into beats and write a verb on each. Read your lines aloud, on your feet. Then run it with the other character's lines spoken, cue and response, three or four times. This is the step actors skip in a hurry and the one that pays most. At midnight the people in your life are asleep, which is the hour I built blablabla for. Go to bed.

In the morning, three runs and stop. The rocky sections will mostly have settled overnight. A few words will have slipped; run those bits twice and leave the rest alone, because past four or five passes you are locking in stale choices.

You are allowed to hold the sides in the room. If a line goes, stay in the scene and find your way back. The hour by hour version is in how to memorize lines overnight, and the wider triage of the night is in how to prepare for an audition you got last night.

Learn lines in another language

I think in Danish and work mostly in English, so this one is personal. Lines in a second language go in slower and come out more brittle. In your own language you learn the sense and the words follow. In someone else's you have to learn the words as words, because your instinct for what comes next is weaker. That pushes you towards rote, which is what makes an actor sound like a recording in any language.

Two things help. Do the scene work in whichever language you think in, so the wants and the verbs are yours, then attach the foreign words to them. And hear the other parts spoken in the language of the script as early as you can, because a cue you have only ever read is a cue you will miss when it arrives with a rhythm you did not expect. blablabla rehearses in whatever language the script is in, so the voices you answer speak the same language you do.

The longer piece, including pronunciation traps, is rehearsing scenes in a language that isn't your first.

Learning lines is one piece of the solo work. Scene analysis, selftaping, cold reads and the rest are in the complete guide to rehearsing alone. Start tonight, out loud, on your feet.