How to Perform a Soliloquy: Who to Talk To, and How to Find the Thoughts

Everyone else has left the stage. The door has closed, the light has narrowed, and it is just you and a page and a half of verse. There is no scene partner to look at, no line to listen to, nobody to push against. Somewhere out there in the dark are a few hundred people waiting to see what you do with it.

It can feel like the hardest moment in the play, and it’s also one of the best things the theater gives you. A soliloquy is the clearest chance the audience gets to hear a character think. Done well, it doesn’t feel like a speech at all. It feels like watching someone work something out in real time.

The short version: find the places where the thought turns, because those turns are the scene. Then decide who you’re talking to in each section, because that choice changes everything about how you play it. Play it as a problem you’re trying to solve, not a recital. And learn it one thought at a time, by meaning, so the words come out of the thinking rather than out of a memorized string.

What a soliloquy is, and what it isn’t

A soliloquy is a speech a character gives when they’re alone onstage, or believe they are. That separates it from a monologue, which can be a long speech to other characters in the room, and from an aside, which is a quick remark the others onstage can’t hear. Our guide to asides, soliloquies, and direct address covers how those three relate.

What matters for you is what the soliloquy is doing in the play. It’s almost never a pause in the story. Something has just happened that the character can’t handle in public, and they need to work through it before the next scene. Hamlet has just watched an actor weep for a made-up queen, and he can’t stand the contrast with his own inaction. The speech is him dealing with that, live.

So treat it like a scene. A scene has a want, an obstacle, and a change. A soliloquy has all three. The obstacle just happens to be inside the character.

Decide who you’re talking to

This is the first real choice, and there are three main options. Each one is legitimate, and each one plays differently.

Talking to yourself

In some eras, notably mid-20th-century England, soliloquies were often played as a private conversation with the self, with the actor avoiding the audience entirely. A teaching exercise from the College of the Holy Cross Measure for Measure project calls this the inward style and links it to John Gielgud’s Hamlet, where the audience was, in effect, eavesdropping on his agonies.

Played inwardly, a soliloquy can feel intimate and raw. The risk is that it closes the audience out. If you choose it, you need two sides of an argument inside you, so the speech is still a conversation, just one where both voices are yours.

Talking to the audience

The other main tradition is to speak directly to the people watching. The same Holy Cross piece notes that David Warner’s 1960s Hamlet, directed by Peter Hall, used direct address and made many audience members feel involved in his thinking.

Ian McKellen makes the case simply in a Folger Shakespeare Library podcast interview. Hamlet is alone, so, as he puts it, “who else can he be talking to, than the audience?” He describes playing Macbeth in a very small Stratford theater, with about 120 people around a circular stage, where over an evening he could look every person in the eye. In bigger houses, he tries to give the feeling that he’s talking directly to them, and audience members have told him, “I felt you were talking to me.”

This approach makes the audience a partner. You can ask them questions, appeal to them, confess to them, even argue with them. The thing to avoid is talking at a general blur. Pick real faces, or real spots in the dark, and talk to one person at a time.

Talking to someone you imagine, or someone onstage

The third option is to direct the speech to a specific listener: a dead parent, a god, the person who wronged you, or, sometimes, someone actually present. In another Folger interview, Derek Jacobi says he played “To be or not to be” not as a soliloquy but to Ophelia, who is onstage in that scene: “I looked in her eyes. I spoke it to her, for her benefit.”

That’s a bold reading, and it only works because Ophelia is there. But the principle carries over to any solo speech. A specific listener gives you something to change, and an actor with something to change is always more watchable than one who is just expressing.

You don’t have to pick one listener for the whole speech, either. You can move between them: a line to themselves, a question to the audience, a curse at someone who isn’t there. Just make each shift a choice, so you always know who you’re talking to right now.

Find the thought changes

Whoever you end up talking to, the speech is built from its turns, so map them early. A soliloquy is a chain of thoughts, and each new thought happens because the last one didn’t settle the problem. Mark every place the character changes direction: a new question, a new tactic, a new discovery.

Look at Hamlet’s “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” from Act 2, Scene 2. He starts by comparing himself with the player who wept for Hecuba. Then, after cataloguing his own failure, he suddenly turns on himself:

A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across?

A few lines later he’s raging at Claudius, and then he catches himself mid-rant:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,

And then, finally, the idea that solves it:

About, my brain! I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play,

Those three moments are the spine of the speech. Self-attack, self-disgust, plan. If you play them as three discoveries, each one happening to you for the first time, the speech has shape. If you play the whole thing at one pitch of fury, it becomes noise. Our guide to beats in acting has more on marking these shifts in any script, and the guide to this Hamlet speech walks through its beats in context.

Play a problem, not a set piece

The biggest trap with a famous soliloquy is treating it as an aria: something to be delivered beautifully, with the audience waiting to admire it. The Holy Cross exercise warns against exactly this, asking that the speech be integrated into the live action rather than delivered as “set speeches.”

The fix is to give yourself something to win. Hamlet wants to understand why he hasn’t acted, and by the end he wants a way to be sure of Claudius’s guilt. Every line is an attempt to get closer to that. When a line doesn’t get him there, he tries another. That’s why the speech keeps moving.

A useful test: could you say what the character knows at the end of the speech that they didn’t know at the start? If the answer is nothing, you haven’t found the speech yet. Something has to change, even if it’s only a decision.

It also helps to keep the speech physically connected to the scene before it. Hamlet’s soliloquy starts the moment the others leave. Don’t wait for the room to settle and then begin. Let the first line come straight out of what just happened.

Learn it one thought at a time

Soliloquies are long, and there’s nobody to feed you a cue. That makes them harder to learn than dialogue, where the other actor’s line pulls yours out of you. Here, the only cue for each line is the thought that came before it.

That’s actually good news, because it’s how professional actors tend to learn anyway. Research by Helga and Tony Noice, summarized in the APS Observer, found that professional actors rarely learn lines by rote. They learn through the meaning and the character’s intentions. For a soliloquy, that means learning the thought chain before the words.

Write a one-line paraphrase of each thought in plain English, in order. For Hamlet’s speech it might start: that actor cried over nothing; I have every reason and do nothing; am I a coward; I’m raging at Claudius; I’m all talk; wait, here’s a plan. Learn that list until you can say it without looking. It becomes the map you’ll hang the words on.

Then learn the words one thought at a time, testing yourself rather than rereading. Cover the speech, say the next thought out loud, and check. When you’re nearly there, try it from first letters only. The speech ends like this:

T p t t / W I c t c o t K.

That’s “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King,” with only the first letter of each word. You can turn any speech into cues like this with our free first-letter tool.

If the soliloquy sits inside a scene you’re rehearsing, Offbook can help with the parts around it. Upload the script, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character, then wait while you speak. You can hide your own lines while everyone else’s stay visible, switch your speech to first-letter cues, and hide the whole script for a final test. Running the scene that leads into the soliloquy is a good way to make the first line come out of what just happened.

A one-week plan for a soliloquy

1. Day one: read the whole play, or at least the scenes around the speech, and write down what has just happened and what the character wants.
2. Day two: paraphrase every line in your own words, and look up any word you’re not sure of.
3. Day three: mark the thought changes, write the one-line map of the speech, and decide who you’re talking to in each section.
4. Day four: learn the first third of the words, one thought at a time.
5. Day five: learn the rest, testing yourself from first letters and then from nothing.
6. Day six: put it on its feet, at performance energy, and let each new thought move you.
7. Day seven: run it for someone, or film it, and check that each discovery reads as new.

If you need to time the speech for an audition, our monologue timer gives an estimate at three paces. Always time a real run too, because pauses add up.

Soliloquies in an audition room

An audition panel isn’t an audience in the dark, and a soliloquy plays a little differently there. Joe Richardson, an audition panelist at Guildford School of Acting, points out in Spotlight’s monologue tips that panels are often taking notes, so a hard stare makes them uncomfortable. Looking just above their eyeline works, as long as you keep your spots consistent. Our guide on where to look in a monologue goes through the options.

If you’ve chosen direct address, you can still do it in an audition, just with the panel’s comfort in mind. Talk to a few points in the room as if they were faces. If you’ve chosen the inward style, give yourself a clear focus point so your eyes don’t drift to the floor.

And keep the stakes up. In a room with fluorescent lights and a folding table, it’s easy to slip into reciting. The thought changes are what save you. Each one is a fresh reason to keep talking. For more speeches to work on, browse our Shakespeare monologues, which include soliloquies like this one.

Questions actors ask

Who do you talk to in a soliloquy?

You can talk to yourself, to the audience, or to a specific listener you imagine, such as a god or a person who isn’t there. Each choice is valid and changes how the speech plays. You can also move between them within one speech, as long as each shift is deliberate.

Should a soliloquy be spoken to the audience?

It can be, and directors often stage it that way. Direct address makes the audience a partner in the character’s thinking. The older inward style, where the character seems to think aloud without seeing the audience, is also a legitimate choice. Decide with your director what the production needs.

How do you memorize a soliloquy?

Learn the chain of thoughts before the words. Write a short paraphrase of each thought in order, learn that, then learn the words one thought at a time by testing yourself instead of rereading. First-letter cues are a good bridge between reading the speech and saying it from memory.

What is the difference between a soliloquy and a monologue?

A soliloquy is spoken by a character who is alone onstage, or believes they are. A monologue is any long speech by one character, and it’s often addressed to other characters who are present. Every soliloquy is a kind of monologue, but not every monologue is a soliloquy.

Can I use a soliloquy as an audition monologue?

Yes. A soliloquy needs no other character onstage, so it can stand alone in the room. Choose one where the character works through a problem and reaches a decision, so the speech has a clear arc. Check the time limit and cut it if you need to.