Equal Ops Casting
We here at Off Book believe strongly that regardless of any other factor, your skills are what make you the best for the job. We’ve put into practice our Equal Opportunities policy and always do our best to cast ‘blind’. That means that our audition panels don’t look at age, gender, disabilities, sexuality or gender. When an actor applies for a role with us, we offer auditions based on training and the last ten credits on their CV. it’s hard making a decision from just that information, but we believe it is the best way of being fair and dealing with everyone in an equal way.
Access Requirements
Since Off Book’s creation, we have been mindful of access requirements. We’ve worked with audiences and actors who have a variety of access needs. As a result we try to do our best to meet the access requirements of anyone involved in our production. This also extends to auditions though.
If you are offered an audition, we’d very much like to hear from you if you do have access requirements. Usually, we will have a conversation with actors wanting to attend auditions to find out what their requirements are. Our aim is to come to a best fit solution for each individual actor about their requirements. After all, what works for one, won’t always work for another.
Monitoring and Reporting
We’ve all seen them and sometimes we’d all prefer not to fill in yet another form, but Diversity Monitoring forms are important. In an industry that is striving to depict an accurate representation of our society on stage and screen we need to know what the current picture is before we can move forward. Diversity Monitoring/Equal Ops Forms help us to do this. With every worker who chooses to fill one in we get a clearer picture about those applying for work and what we can do that better engages certain communities.
Rest assured though, this information is never seen by an audition/hiring panel prior to decision being made. All diversity monitoring is handled by an admin assistant.
As of 2017 Off Book also publishes it’s monitoring reports following each production. These reports are also sent to Equity and the Arts Council England. They are available here publicly to be downloaded and viewed by anyone.