Introduction

The actor’s nightmare

You’re standing on the stage in front of a packed auditorium. All eyes are on you. The lights. The darkness. The moment of glory. Then suddenly – out of nowhere – the dry mouth… the sweaty palms… the shaking knees… and the empty head. Lines well learnt – now lost in space. The feeling of falling… failing… freaking out… and fainting. And then you wake up!

Yet for many of us as actors, the nightmare becomes a reality. Stage fright – or ‘The Fear’, as Antony Sher famously calls it – has the power of a monster to drive seasoned professionals and acolyte beginners away from the stage for months, years, and even lifetimes. Laurence Olivier suffered stage fright from his teens to his sixties. Barbra Streisand avoided live performance for twenty-seven years. Marilyn Monroe, Ian Holm, Carly Simon, Kenneth Branagh – not to mention the great actor-trainers, Lee Strasberg and Konstantin Stanislavsky – the list of sufferers (in varying degrees) goes on and on…

There are lots of reasons why we suffer stage fright. It could be the way in which a play was rehearsed. It could be our relationship with the director. The fact that our agent is in the audience. The size of the part (and small roles can be more terrifying than leads). Added to which, the sensations of stage fright are mysterious. Sometimes the monster hunts us down ferociously; sometimes it’s little more than a butterfly. Sometimes it’s the press night that can be paralysing; sometimes it’s the hundredth performance of a six-month run. Sometimes the monster has the girth of Godzilla. Sometimes it’s a demon with the blackness of Beelzebub. Sometimes it’s a pesky imp. Sometimes it’s just an ugly worm. Yet, however it manifests itself (as I said in the Preface), we don’t talk about our stage fright very often. After all, there’s a certain shame attached to it. We feel our professionalism is at stake: we might be found wanting or unreliable – or, at worst, unemployable. So there are very few in-depth analyses of actors’ anxieties, unlike the myriad studies in sport and stories in music, including that of Sara Solovitch.

Facing the Fear addresses the actor’s silence. It provides – amongst other things – an outlet for actors to share their stage fright and to understand that it’s not shameful. It’s not unprofessional or amateur. It’s normal. It’s human. And it’s part of the profession. We look the monster in the eye – often using first-person narratives to conjure up the immediacy. And my intention is to prove that, if the monster has to exist – as indeed it probably does – then we can live with it productively and maybe even pleasurably.

Facing the Fear is not a quick-fix manual. (Though, if that’s what you’re looking for, you could cut to Chapter 5. Alternatively, you could do what many musicians do and take a beta blocker; though I don’t recommend it, as quick fixes rarely work.) Nor is it a book on how to act. If all is going well for you, you don’t need to follow any of the tips. That said, there’s something for most kinds of actors in most kinds of situations – whether or not there’s an issue with performance anxiety. We focus mainly on theatre, as that’s the environment in which the stakes are highest. By which I mean that there are people present who have paid to see our work, and it’s hard to stop and start again if anything goes wrong. Live theatre is a tightrope in a way that television and film aren’t. Though there’s plenty in this book that applies to screen as well as stage.

Facing the Fear is ultimately a journey. A journey into the mysterious truths of stage fright. Truths such as the fact that we start to fear what we thought we loved. That we become our own enemy. That the human mind is complex, as indeed is the acting craft. This journey has many stories, along with some science, some history, some psychology, and some practical strategies. We’ll do a little time-travelling, as well as voyaging into our own minds. And, like all journeys, it takes time. As I said, this book is not a quick fix (though it might save you a fortune in psychotherapist’s fees!).

But why do I want to talk about stage fright in the first place?

Where this journey began

In 2004, I was smitten with an overwhelming bout of stage fright. It was very near the end of a five-month run of David Hare’s powerful verbatim play The Permanent Way, directed by Max Stafford-Clark for his company Out of Joint in collaboration with the National Theatre. I’ll let my production journal reveal the pride and fall:

May 1st 2004: Last night at the National Theatre

The last night at the National and the end of something very special. I’ve never before felt so strongly that performing a play could be so important. The audiences have been incredible, with all kinds of eulogies – from critics, public, theatre professionals, stage-door staff and ushers. It has been extraordinary.

It’ll be good to get out of London, though. Not that I’ve been nervous, not that it’s ever worried me who’s in and what they might think. But who knows? – There might be a sense of ‘pressure off’ among us all, so that we can finish this long run with some playful fun.

May 5th: First night at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Courtyard Studio Theatre

What a nightmare!

Tonight I had every actor’s worst possible scenario. I get midway through a sentence – and my brain shuts down. All those thoughts I’d had about being out of London – the pressure off and the fun on – couldn’t have been further from the truth. Earlier in the day during the tech rehearsal, my fellow actor Matthew Dunster looked out into the auditorium of the intimate Courtyard Theatre, where the front row is barely a foot from the stage. ‘God, they’re close!’ he said. ‘This is scary!’ I didn’t think anything of it at the time, apart from being surprised that any of us should find anything scary so far into the run.

Then – during the show – I walk to the front of the stage in the role of the Investment Banker and, as always during this moment, I address a member of the audience. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I can only work when I feel the hot breath of a competitor down my neck.’ Well, that’s what I’m supposed to say…

Instead, I manage to say, ‘Well, I don’t know about you…’ but then, as I look at this man on the fourth row, I can see the whites of his eyes. ‘Wow!’ I think. ‘You really are close, aren’t you?’ And at that moment, any connection to the play is cut in my brain. I have no idea what I’m supposed to say next.

Strangely, I don’t get the mad pumping of adrenalin that I’ve had in the past when I’ve momentarily tripped over a word. No heart pounding, no instant sense of fight or flight. Just a feeling of floating away… Into oblivion… As if I’m in a dream and nothing really matters… In this fleeting moment, it doesn’t matter that I’m eyeballing a total stranger and saying whatever nonsensical words come out of my mouth. It doesn’t matter that Max Stafford-Clark and Ian Brown (Artistic Director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse) are watching, and his casting director, and a full house of audience from Leeds. It’s just me and this kind of floating-away feeling.

The moment maybe lasts a split second, yet it seems like a thousand years. Somehow I retrieve the next line and manage to get to the end of the scene seemingly in control. But all the time, I just want to slip into this strange kind of fainting place. I get off stage feeling totally, utterly spaced out.

And then it hits. The shakes and the palpitations kick in. It’s as if my legs from pelvis to knee don’t exist – it’s just thin air. My peripheries have vanished. I can’t feel my hands. Maybe I’d experienced some kind of ‘connection overload’ out there. What I mean is that in the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, I hadn’t really been able to see the eyes of the person whom I’d picked out in the audience for the Investment Banker’s ‘hot breath of a competitor’ line. Here, however, the guy on the fourth row was as clear as daylight. And he was looking straight back at me. There was a true connection, and maybe the electrical currents of that connection overloaded my brain, giving me a moment of meltdown. Who knows? Whatever…

May 12th: First night at the Oxford Playhouse

I’m just so glad to be back in a bigger space. You’d think this verbatim play would be perfectly designed for intimate studio spaces, but I’m so much happier now that we’re back in the big theatre of the Oxford Playhouse. Apart from anything else, I can’t see the audience!

May 14th: Third night at the Oxford Playhouse

I don’t believe it!

It’s the last time Sir David Hare is going to see the play and I do it again! I fuck up! I’m shocked and appalled at myself. This time it was a stupid fluff, and again as the Investment Banker. What is it with that character? She’s supposed to be calm and confident. Instead of saying, ‘In fact, you can hardly get out of the country without using something I’ve had my finger in,’ I say, ‘In fact, you can hardly get your finger… out of… something I’ve had my finger in…!’ In that split second, my brain does a million somersaults as I strain to bring everything back to the present tense. But what a load of bollocks came out of my mouth! And I know what Sir David is like! I know he won’t let me off the hook!

Sure enough, he’s backstage after the show in the middle of a conversation – and suddenly he sees me. ‘And as for you!’ he booms down the corridor. ‘Oh, no – could you tell?’ I wince. ‘Of course I could tell! It was a load of rubbish!…’ And off we all troop into the Yorkshire night. And the knight goes off to the station to catch the last train back to London. And yes, yes – I’ll never work in British theatre again…!

My stage fright grew worse in the final two weeks of the run. I came down with chronic laryngitis and could barely be heard. It was as if my body didn’t want me to go out onto the stage and into the spotlight any more, but, with no understudies, I had no choice.

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone in feeling performance anxiety so very late in this long run, and little by little some of the other actors spoke of how uneasy they were feeling. It was then I began to realise that sharing our fear-based stories brings with it a kind of talking cure.

The talking cure

It takes courage to be an actor. It takes even greater courage to admit how terrifying it can be. Yet the very act of admitting it can be transformative. Describing the actor as An Acrobat of the Heart, Stephen Wangh writes, ‘It takes real courage to say, “I am afraid”, so in the act of naming it you are already converting the fear into usable energy.’4 Certainly sharing my ‘shameful’ secret with some of my fellow actors was an important part of dealing with the situation. That said, not all of them wanted to talk about their experiences. And it’s true that the small amount of literature that exists about stage fright tends to stem from psychologists and theatre scholars, rather than the actors themselves. There’s something of a conspiracy of silence. Which isn’t surprising. We all know that stage fright is an irrational fear. After all, the audience and the performance situation can’t (usually) harm us. So the damaging force has to be our own inner messages. In fact, all too easily stage fright can feel like some sort of mental illness, or what German scholar Adolph Kielblock (back in the 1890s) called, ‘the result of a morbid state of the imagination’.5 That’s almost the scariest part of the fear: we’re doing it to ourselves. And if we’re not careful, we start perpetuating our own downfall. Our morbid imagination conjures up all sorts of catastrophic conclusions that wholly outweigh any rational assessment of the situation – like ‘I’ll never work in British theatre again…!’

The thing is that, whether we realise it or not, we’re going to talk about our stage fright anyway. If we’re not going to talk about it out loud to others, we’re going to find ourselves talking about it over and over and over in our heads. In fact, there aren’t many healthy options when it comes to dealing with stressful situations. Sometimes we pretend they don’t bother us. Sometimes we try to avoid them. Yet both of these strategies (according to writer Taylor Clark) ‘are destined to fail’.⁶ Clark suggests that if we try to control our emotions or we try to avoid the stressful situation, we actually keep our fears alive – because then a significant part of our thoughts is taken up with worrying about how we’re going to avoid it. It’s a downward spiral. We’ll look at worry in more detail in Chapter 1. For the moment let’s acknowledge that worrying may have the short-term pay-off of making us less afraid, but in the long term it traps us in a cycle of anxiety.⁷ This cycle of anxiety is perpetuated by the fact that the voice in our head (‘the Fear Voice,’ as sports psychologist Don Green calls it)⁸ doesn’t just talk – it literally poisons us. It leads our brain to create more stress chemicals such as cortisol. And these stress chemicals increase our physical state of alarm – and so the situation simply grows worse. Our inner Fear Voice is chemically – as well as psychologically – unhealthy. So we might as well talk about our stage fright out loud!

Yes, indeed, talking about our anxieties has been scientifically proven to help. It’s known in psychology as ‘flooding therapy’. Every time we confront, describe and relive our thoughts about a negative experience, we find that ‘the very act of disclosure lessens these thoughts’.9 So by putting our feelings into words, we actually change how our brain deals with the stressful information. (Not least because we’re producing less cortisol.) It’s also known as ‘mindful noting’. And the very act of translating our stressful feelings into words (or mindfully noting them) is almost more therapeutic than understanding them. As we try to put the chaos of our feelings into logical sentences, we find ourselves unpicking that chaos, like knots in a string. And then we can be more objective about what we’re feeling, whether or not we actually understand it.¹⁰ (‘I feel afraid – though I’ve no idea why – but at least I feel better for naming it “fear”.’)

Of course, it’s very difficult for us as actors to confess that we’re experiencing anything that might in any way impede our work as professionals. Jobs are hard enough to come by without directors or casting directors getting a whiff that we might be afraid of what we do. Yet if we don’t talk about it, our Fear Voice keeps us alone with our fear, and coping with a fear alone can be difficult and distressing. As biophysicist Stefan Klein puts it: ‘Loneliness is a burden for spirit and body. Getting support is normally one of the best ways of dealing with stress.’¹¹ So rather than churning our anxieties over in our heads, we should share our fears out loud. That way, we can change our damaging inner monologue and, thus, reduce our stress hormones. This is pretty important for us as actors, as stress hormones do two unhelpful things. They undermine our immune system (and no actor can afford to be ill) and they affect our memory (and absolutely no actor can afford to lose their memory!). As we’ll see throughout this book, loss of memory and stage fright are intricately interwoven. So talking about our fear might actually improve our memory, which in turn will reduce our stage fright. Seems like a no-brainer to me!

So let’s put the talking cure straight into practice with two more stories about stage fright. Both of the actors who share their experiences here were open and generous in their vivid descriptions. And they pinpoint some of the powerful factors that can trigger our feelings of stage fright.

‘The embodiment of evil’: losing faith in our performance

Richard Seer is an award-winning actor and director, as well as running the MFA Theatre programme at the University of San Diego. His story highlights what can happen to us when we lose our faith in our performance:

I was in a pretty terrible production of Richard III which had started at Stratford, Connecticut, where the New York critics had seen it – and they hated it. Then we moved to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, which is a very high-profile venue. I was playing Tyrell, but it was actually six roles all put together to make me sort of ‘the embodiment of evil’. And I’d already been told by the critics that I wasn’t any good. But it wasn’t just me. The disdain for the production was universal – we were all equally hated. So each night, I had to go out there with a kind of bravery and say, ‘No, it’s just fine.’ But in the back of my mind, I knew it wasn’t just fine.

Then, during one particular night’s performance, I had the most trouble…

The incident happened quite far into the play – in a moment when King Richard summons Tyrell to his presence. The director had staged it so that every time I made an entrance, the rest of the cast would freeze. The wind would sound and the lighting would change, and I would make a slow entrance onto the stage – after all, I was the Embodiment of Evil. The other characters would make a big deal about it for a moment and then everything would return to normal. The audience, of course, was utterly perplexed as to why I was doing it – which made it worse. Since I was essentially playing the servant’s role, the audience must have thought, ‘Who is that guy?’

Anticipating this particular entrance on this one particular evening, I started to panic – really panic. I thought, ‘I can’t go on. I don’t know my lines. I don’t know what I’m going to say.’ And this was unusual, as I’d never had a problem learning lines in the past. I went straight to the stage manager and I said, ‘I don’t think I can go on.’ I was having trouble breathing. Incredible heart palpitations were happening. My costume was very constricting. So I kept trying to open it up, to loosen it, because I thought, ‘Am I going to faint? Am I going to black out?’ All I knew was that I was panicking.

The stage manager didn’t know what to do. There was no way of notifying my understudy as he was already on stage in an ensemble role. So the stage manager kept saying, ‘No, I think you can try. Just get through this scene.’ And finally – I simply couldn’t. I went to my dressing room and they rang the hospital. Meanwhile, King Richard called several times for Tyrell to come onto the stage. Fortunately my understudy figured out that I wasn’t coming on, so he stepped forward and started saying my lines.

At the time, I thought I was having a heart attack because my heart was going like crazy and I couldn’t breathe. So, sure enough, they sent an ambulance, I was taken to the hospital, they did all the appropriate tests for an emergency, and the doctor said, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with you. You seem to be fine.’ But I didn’t quite believe it…

A couple of days later, sure enough – the same things were happening. They called the ambulance again and I went to the hospital again. Thank God the same doctor was there in ER. And after they’d finished the tests, she said, ‘I think this is psychological. I’m not saying it’s not real, but it’s different. These are panic attacks that you’re having.’12

Over the course of the next few days, the panic attacks grew quite severe. I was no longer sleeping. I had extreme muscle contractions in my back and my neck, which were gripping me. I would wake up in the middle of the night with intense pains that would last most of the day. And there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to solve it. I tried exercising. I tried all sorts of things. Nothing worked.

I was still performing every night and it was miserable – because I felt as if I’d caused a big scene and let everyone down. So it took hours of mental and physical preparation to go through all this. It was as if I were preparing for death in a way, which made the panic even greater: ‘Is it going to happen now? Am I going to feel this way again?’ And I began to understand by the end of the run that in some way I was creating this.13

Richard Seer’s overwhelming sense of self-sabotage is no doubt shared by many of us who have suffered acute stage fright. We’ll explore this more in the course of Facing the Fear, as well as the idea of the power of the critics. But for the moment, let’s have some more talking cure.

‘Rejecting the play like a failed organ transplant’: losing faith in the material

Tim Orr – Producing Artistic Director at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival – vividly conjures up in his story the panic that can arise when we lose faith, both in a play and in our actual, creative existence. Again, his words speak for themselves:

A few years ago, I was in a production where I had a near panic attack in the middle of a performance, and it scared the hell out of me. In my mind, I was gripped by this overwhelming panic for five to ten minutes. In actuality, it was probably under a minute. It had never happened before and it has never happened since.

The play was a two-hander comedy from the early 1960s. It’s horribly dated and hugely insensitive to women, it’s not very funny, and it makes light of suicide. We were doing eight shows a week and I just hated doing it. My body didn’t want to do the play. I had to drag myself to the theatre, put on that costume, and throw myself onto the stage. Not out of stage fright: it was just worse than digging a ditch. Because the play was a two-hander, I knew that as soon as I stepped out on stage, I wasn’t leaving it for two hours. Two hours of having to speak the most awful dreck with no escape… The director and I had locked horns a couple of times during rehearsal because he wanted me to have twice the energy – but I just couldn’t find it.

It’s a Thursday matinee. There are seven people in the audience. I’m out there on the stage with the woman playing the other part. We’re on page two of this play and she’s talking. I know that she’s about to finish talking any second now… and I suddenly realise that I just don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth. I’ve had that feeling before on stage and I know that as soon as I inhale, something will come out – and nobody’s going to die if I say the wrong thing or get lost for a moment. But usually I’m in a play with eight, nine, ten, fifteen people: there are places to hide, there are people to help.

She’s still talking and I still have no idea what I’m going to say. And I realise that I’m blank about the rest of the whole play. That my body is about to say, ‘No!’ to doing it. That my body is going to reject doing the next hour and fifty-eight minutes of this play for these seven people in this auditorium. And I’m not going to be able to will my body. The whole play has just flown out of my head, and I don’t think I’ll be able to call it up right now – because I just don’t want to do it! I suddenly break into a very cold sweat. And I think, ‘I’m going to have to turn to the audience and apologise to them and leave the stage. I think I’m about to call the show! Yes, I think I’m about to do that!’

So the actress stops talking and I take a deep breath. And that’s when I have the panic attack. I have a moment of doing absolutely nothing. Then I just start moving all over the stage, picking up all the books I can find and piling all these books into my arms – while blathering, babbling some words in the moment. Somehow it feels natural to start picking up props. I think, ‘If I just start moving, the audience won’t know that there’s nothing happening in my head. If I’m moving, it’ll look as though it’s part of the action of the show – and I’ll eventually get out of this silence in my head.’ I knew my character’s intention at this point in the play, so I improvised there for a second – and actually I was pretty darn close to the text. But it was as if I was on the outside, looking down – and it was terrifying!

At the same time, I was angry. I was angry about having to do this awful play. Angry that this was what I was doing for a living right now – in a terrible, terrible contract for a terrible, terrible wage. Doing this eight times a week was absolutely meaningless. And that anger suddenly gave me adrenalin. Adrenalin was leaking out of my ears and out of the corners of my eyes and I had more energy than I ever thought possible. And it launched me into the play. I was back on track. I got on a roll and I reached the finish line. Maybe the fear of the fear returning is what kept me going. I probably did the show at twice the speed – probably the speed that the director had wanted all along!

For the rest of the production run, I got through each performance on sheer willpower. The memory of that experience didn’t leave me: it was always lurking in the back of my mind. Success for me was just getting through a show. I never felt as if I owned my performance: my body rejected that play like a failed organ transplant.14

From the inside out

What these vivid stories encourage – apart from the easeful cure of talking – is a curiosity about what causes stage fright in the first place. After all, few actors are the same again after they’ve experienced it. To begin answering these questions, Facing the Fear uses what’s known as ‘practice-based research’. Practice-based research is really just research based in action rather than theory to solve a problem. It operates from the inside out, in the sense that, as the writer of this book, I’m not a scholar or a critic or a psychologist. I’m an actor steeped in the experience of stage fright and I have a clear intention of finding some answers for that problem. Usually, in the creative arts, practice-based research is ‘motivated by emotional, personal and subjective concerns’15 – and that’s exactly what stage fright is. It’s emotional. It’s very personal. And it’s highly subjective. In the pages of this book, we analyse the personal, emotional, subjective experiences of stage fright to see how we can diminish the power of this otherwise crippling Fear – working from inside the problem and reaching out to our fellow actors.

The first half of Facing the Fear looks at the very nature of stage fright from various perspectives and we ask a series of questions. We start in Chapter 1 by asking, ‘What is stage fright?’ (And we’ll look at it physiologically and psychologically.) In Chapter 2, we ask, ‘How did we get here?’ (And we look at the power of the audience itself.) Since most actors’ biggest stage-fright fear is forgetting their lines (as we’ve seen in the three personal accounts so far), we address in Chapter 3 the question audiences ask us all the time: ‘How do you remember all those lines?’ (And we look at the neuroscience of memory and learning.)

Then in the second part of the book, we move into a practical terrain. In Chapter 4, we ask, ‘What goes on in the rehearsal room?’ (And we look at the immensely powerful actor-director relationship.) And finally in Chapter 5, we ask, ‘How do we develop good practices?’ (And we’ll see how we can formulate our own anti-fear strategies.) The intention is that, by the end of Facing the Fear, we’ll have torn stage fright to shreds – like a terrier with a rabbit in its jaws – till there’s not much left to scare us.

The important thing to remember is that many actors never suffer bad stage fright. Most of us experience a lively adrenalin buzz – and that’s perfectly normal, if not actually rather helpful. The point of this book is to dispel the unhelpful nerves. If you’ve never suffered from stage fright, it’s a chance for you to get to know what your fellow actors might be going through. And there’s no need to worry that by knowing all the ins and outs of stage fright, you’re somehow going to provoke it. In fact, the opposite is true. By the end of this book, you’ll see that not only is a certain performance buzz a benefit, but that any unnecessary stage fright can ultimately be overcome. In fact, the monster is rather funny when you look it in the eye. It need be no more frightening than Shrek!

Fighting or facing?

When I originally conceived of this book, I was going to call it Fighting the Fear. Like Olivier in the quotation on the frontispiece, I saw it as a battle. As the quest has unfolded, though, I’ve become more and more convinced that if we fight against the fear, we actually make it worse. If we can live with it, finding positive ways of facing it – even embracing it – we really can diminish its grip and in many ways overcome it. The poet Maya Angelou was very open about her own nervousness before every performance. Her advice was categorical: ‘Accept it; don’t fight it.’16 Sound advice – but we can’t accept it until we’ve faced it. And although we’re not going to fight it per se, we’re going to adopt some battle imagery in our first stage of facing the fear, since forewarned is forearmed. Once we get out onto the battlefield, however, our maneouvres will be more like t’ai chi and aikido than those involving armoured tanks and AK47s: we’ll topple our enemy by using its own force. But first, let’s head into the war room and begin to know the nature of that enemy.