ENO plans to grow its own It's a halfway house between the old principle, whereby singers were kept expensively and inflexibly on staff as part of a resident ensemble (as at the Royal Ballet), and the newer apprentice-style programmes imported from the US, such as the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists scheme, which are essentially post-post-graduate courses for singers at the very beginning of their careers, assigned only tiny roles and understudy duties. Sponsored by ENO's outgoing chairman, Sir Vernon Ellis, and the Shears Foundation, the ENO Harewood Singers will follow a different model. Individuals will be paid per performance and also given all manner of free coaching, mentoring and pastoral attention, including access to a performance psychologist who can help them exorcise their demons, realise their goals and do better than their best. But on stage they won't be singing just "The carriage awaits" or "Alas he is dead" - and John McMurray, ENO's excellent head of casting and the project's chief backroom boy, insists that this will be the scheme's defining characteristic. "I don't think one- or two-line roles are good for young singers," he told me. They're very hard, but in the wrong way, because if you aren't experienced, they don't give you anything back: they're just a test in standing around and waiting. I want to give these younger singers roles which will stretch them healthily and build them up, without forcing them to take on things to which they aren't suited. The full impact of the ENO Harewood Singers will become evident when the 2012-13 season is announced next week, but as a shot across the bows, one of their number, the tremendously promising baritone Benedict Nelson, gets his big chance in the title role of the new production of Britten's Billy Budd, which opens on June 18. Next season will also see prominent challenges given to the already up-and-coming Elizabeth Llewellyn, Mary Bevan, Kate Valentine, Ben Johnson and Nicky Spence, along with some lesser-known names such as Julia Sporsén and George van Bergen. It's an investment in ENO's future: the larger hope must be that there will be payback for the company as at least some of these young talents develop a popular following, increase their star power and stay loyal to ENO when they leave home and launch their international careers. The Royal Ballet's four-legged hoofer Should you happen to be walking along the Strand or past the London Eye in the middle of the evening during the next few weeks, you may be lucky enough to encounter the delightful sight of a Shetland pony being gently led through the streets to his stable in Vauxhall by his owner, George Gold. This endearing creature, name of Formakin (after the Perthshire estate from which he hails), will have just appeared at the Royal Opera House in the Royal Ballet's revival of Ashton's La Fille mal gardée (020 7304 4000). In the show, he invariably draws an Aah! of pleasure from the audience as he pulls the cart that takes the heroine Lise and her mother Widow Simone to the harvest home, which brings the first act to a climax. Formakin is 15 years old and comes from a showbiz background - in other words, like his ancestors, he has been bred to be of a placid temperament suitable to withstand all the Sturm und Drang of theatrical performance. A perfect trouper, he doesn't do tantrums or refusals, he just gets on with the job. His dressing room at Covent Garden is a little patch of carpet in the wings, where, rather than the champagne and caviar which today's egomaniacal stars demand in their contract riders, he requires only a bag of hay and a bowl of water. Here he is much petted by the dancers - except possibly by the wretched member of the corps de ballet charged with the unenviable task of walking behind him, carrying a trug which conceals equipment ready to mop up any business dumped in the course of his promenade. George Gold assures me that this doesn't happen often. Formakin has no nerves, and although the pony has appeared in several runs of La Fille, Gold believes he remains sublimely oblivious to the small sensation made by his arrival on stage, and doubts that he even registers the catchy tune that accompanies his nightly triumph. So how do actors remember all their lines? As a middle-aged sufferer from What-the-hell-was-his-name? syndrome, I am increasingly in awe of actors" feats of memory. How do they learn all those lines so confidently and so quickly? I thought I'd interview Cillian Murphy on the subject. He is about to appear at the National Theatre in Misterman, a one-man play by Enda Walsh which has been described as a sort of epic version of Krapp's Last Tape (it runs in the Lyttelton repertory until May 28). In a performance that has already been acclaimed at the Galway Arts Festival and on Broadway, Murphy plays a crazy evangelist, confined to an abandoned warehouse in rural Ireland where he is haunted by ghosts of the past and the sinfulness of the villagers who surround him. It's a 90-minute monologue, albeit one interrupted by taped voices. Alas, Murphy had nothing illuminating to tell me. He just sat down and learnt it, he said, over three months when he had nothing else much to do. This sort of thing clearly isn't a problem for professional actors: they don't know how they do it, they simply have a well-exercised muscle that I have never bothered to develop, and work on a system of self-prodding cues. Any other tips? Verse is obviously easier to commit than prose, and you should focus more on the meaning of what you are learning than on specific words - Method actors put great store on being able to attach an emotion to a line. Someone once told me that it is easier to memorise things backwards, but possibly that's one for April 1. Even so, I do marvel at how Simon Russell Beale managed to learn the whole of the title role in Richard III in one day (having locked himself in his bathroom, he told me); or how Fiona Shaw can recite The Waste Land word-perfectly at the drop of a hat. Is great literature easier to memorise than soap-opera twaddle, I wonder?