Preface

It was the summer of 2011 when I started thinking seriously about writing a book on stage fright. I was with my husband, Miles Anderson, at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, where he was playing two vast roles in one Shakespeare festival under the direction of Adrian Noble. Knowing that he would only have a few weeks’ rehearsals – for Prospero in The Tempest and Salieri in Amadeus – Miles started learning his lines months in advance. A strict schedule of so many lines every day for so many weeks dictated his life. And each day, for hours on end, he would labour over his scripts – sitting on the sofa, walking in the woods, staring at the stars – muttering and musing and magicking the roles. His hard work certainly paid off that summer to overwhelming critical acclaim, yet still the little demon of performance nerves would wink from the wings on the odd occasion and nibble away at his confidence.

The following year I found myself facing a similar challenge, when I was cast in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival under the direction of Shakespeare guru Tina Packer. Months in advance of the dauntingly short rehearsal period, I began the inevitable line-bashing. I knew that I had to be totally confident from the minute I entered the rehearsal room: there could be no room for self-doubt. And why? Because I was harbouring a ‘dirty secret’. Back in 2004, I’d suffered chronic stage fright. I wasn’t very proud of it, so I didn’t talk about it much. Nor did I seek help beyond just getting back on the ‘horse’ of acting and reading lots of books. Nonetheless, the experience had haunted me for years. Yet the desire to get to the bottom of it had haunted me in equal measure. So when Nick Hern agreed to the proposed book, I was extremely excited. My excitement was spurred during the writing process when serendipitously more and more prominent actors came out of the stage-fright closet. In the autumn of 2013, Derek Jacobi’s autobiography, As Luck Would Have It, was published, and he appeared in a number of interviews talking frankly about his performance fears. Earlier that summer, Michael Gambon had admitted in the national press to the crippling stage fright that had hounded him for years, even leading to his hospitalisation twice.1 Their brave and public admissions of stage fright galvanised my belief that this book – Facing the Fear – could perhaps be very useful to the acting community at large.

It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t suffered stage fright to know what it’s actually like. It’s hard for directors to truly understand what actors are going through in rehearsal or performance, unless they’ve been actors themselves. It’s hard for audience members – however versed they might be in theatre – to comprehend the inner chaos. ‘I’m alone – oh, God, how alone I am!’ bewailed Laurence Olivier, as he waited in the wings to go on as Shylock. ‘Nobody understands this… nobody.’² And that’s part of the imperative of writing this book. To enable directors, writers, stage managers, critics, audiences – in fact, anyone engaged in making or watching performance – to have more understanding of what acting really entails. And stage fright clearly fascinates the public, as evidenced by the various books on public speaking as well as the wide-scale appeal of pianist Sara Solovitch’s heartfelt account of Playing Scared (also published while I was writing this book, in summer 2015).³ This book is different, though. It’s not about public speaking. Nor is it about performing music. It’s about the specific challenges facing actors. The challenges of taking on another character. Of speaking somebody else’s words. Of trying to synchronise our own feelings with those of the fictional character. And what do we do if our feelings are completely different from the character – such as when we’re suffering stage fright? How on earth do we reconcile our own nerves with a cool, calm or confident character? That’s an unnerving ‘schizophrenia’ that maybe only actors can understand.

It’s common knowledge that many musicians use beta blockers to reduce the physiological effects of their performance anxiety (indeed, Solovitch talks about it openly) – though I’ve never heard an actor share this practice. Maybe that’s because our art relies on us being absolutely present to our feelings, sensations, and emotions. Acting is all about opening our heart and being emotionally thin-skinned, whereas beta blockers are all about blocking our heart’s adrenalin receptors. That said, maybe my actor-friends are taking beta blockers and it’s just another ‘dirty secret’. Who knows? I do know that what we do as actors is complex and subtle, as indeed is stage fright. So while this book offers insights for directors, stage managers, critics, audiences, et al., ultimately it’s for all fellow actors and companions on the path. How much more could we help each other if we knew what we might be secretly going through?