by Donald Molosi

As I reflect on two decades of my professional stage career, I realize that mine is an unexpected story having grown up in a Botswana without TV but aspiring to one day be on TV.

My professional theatre practice for the past 21 years meant that I necessarily lived most of it outside Botswana because there are no professional theatres in Botswana to this day.

But this column is not about me who is retiring from professional theatre, but rather about those who are coming up.

Actors must never pay for an audition in order to be considered for casting. Can you imagine the ethical slippery slope that the exchange of money for the assessment of talent can create?

And yet, somehow in Botswana people get away with publicly advertising that they charge audition fees, publicly declaring that they are scamming. It remains wrong and I encounter it too often as I mentor young people through my theatre company.

I have lived and auditioned on every continent in the world (except Antarctica) and in all my two decades in international professional theatre, I never paid for a casting audition because no one should.

The only time I have paid for an audition was for Drama School in London years ago and that an education institution can charge application fees. It is not for casting.

As auditions apply to Botswana in casting film and theatre though, the practice is more like paying for a job interview to benefit a filmmaker personally. An application for a Drama School is not an interview for a role in a play; that is the difference.

I don’t have enough column space to elucidate more but please, do not pay for casting auditions. Report those auditioners instead.

I spent more than a decade performing off-Broadway from the mid2000s. Even there, on the most prestigious theatre stages in the world, no one will ask for a penny to audition you.

Even in the film, no one should take a penny from you to audition you. Perhaps this should be one of the first items on the agenda for the much-expected Botswana National Arts Council: to mitigate the abuse of performers in the corrupt name of audition fees.

* Donald Molosi is an award-winning actor. He is star of the upcoming film, Station Road which is currently filming in Kingston, Jamaica. He is President of the Upright African Movement.