1. What is Stage Fright?

‘Know the enemy’

Sun Tzu (the famous Chinese general from 6 BCE) was a fearsome military strategist. ‘Know the enemy and know yourself,’ he wrote, ‘and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.’18 The last thing we want when we’re on the stage is to feel as if we’re in peril. So our task in this chapter is to get to know our enemy – and that inevitably involves us getting to know our self. After all, the enemy of stage fright lurks inside our own brain and body: we ourselves are its Trojan Horse. It’s a mind-expanding journey that we’re about to embark upon. The terrain is treacherous. The enemy cunning. So, like generals in a war room, we’d better lay out a battle plan as clearly as we can.

There are three key assessments that we need to make: (1) How is the war waged? (2) Who is our enemy? And (3) What are our own capabilities? The bulk of this chapter falls into three sections that deal with each of these assessments.

In the first section – A Bird’s Eye View of the Processes of Stage Fright – we address how the war is waged. We lay out the battle plan and examine the enemy’s tactics, asking the questions: how do we experience stage fright? What provokes it, given our DNA (i.e. the evolutionary factors that we might not know)? What provokes it, given our industry (i.e. the external factors that we can’t control)? What provokes it, given our temperaments (i.e. the internal factors that we might be able to change)?

In the second section – The Nature of Fear – we study more closely who our enemy is. As if we’re placing figures onto the battle plan, we encounter the ‘fear family’ of worry, anxiety, stress and depression. After all, once we get to know our enemy, we can start to know our self.

The third section – The Nature of Us – is all about getting to know our self and our own capabilities, so that in a hundred battles we shall never be in peril. This involves us unpacking the basic paradox of acting: i.e. how can we be fully engrossed in the role while at the same time being attentive to all the technical stuff? As actors, we need this level of ‘dual consciousness’: indeed, we can’t do our work without it. We have to be able to lose ourselves in the passionate kiss with Antony, whilst also making sure that we’re in the light, that we’re facing downstage, and that our Cleopatra headdress doesn’t fall off. Yet when stage fright hits us, it’s like an ambush. It can take us by surprise and with such a force, that our consciousness is no longer dual: instead, it shatters into a thousand shards. So in The Nature of Us, we look at what consciousness really means, in terms of who are we, and what makes us who we are. Then we may be able to understand what’s happening when our consciousness fragments during stage fright.

The very thought of facing our stage fright can be daunting. Human beings are complex and there’s a lot in this chapter to understand. So we’ll end the chapter with a note on courage. In fact, we focus on two people whose courage turned their stage fright into something that could benefit us all: the pioneering actor-trainers, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg.

By the end of this chapter, we should have some clear knowledge about how the enemy operates, who exactly they are, and who we are as their opponents. We’ll then be in a stronger position with the following chapters to create some strategies for facing the fear and embracing the foe.

Assessment 1: A Bird’s Eye View
of the Processes of Stage Fright

Our first battle tactic is to recognise the two ways in which our stage fright manifests itself: physiologically and psychologically.

Physiological manifestations of stage fright

It’s not difficult to recognise when our body is suffering an attack of stage fright. Our muscles tense. Our knees tremble. Our heart pounds. Our hands grow clammy. Butterflies batter about our stomach and we think we need the loo. Then out we go onto the stage – and just when we need our spittle to speak, our mouth dries up like the Sahara Desert. We suddenly feel light-headed, maybe even to the point of vertigo. In fact, when Anthony Sher was playing Iago in Japan for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he suffered ‘small but alarming losses of balance’ which threatened to tip him off the stage and he thought he was in an earthquake!19

All these physiological gymnastics are the body adapting to what it knows to be an important situation. The trouble is that our body doesn’t actually need to do all that preparation: it’s out of kilter with the task in hand. After all, it’s not an earthquake and we’re not really under attack. And what happens when our physiological response is out of kilter is that we find it hard to concentrate on what we’re supposed to be doing. Indeed, fractured concentration is a large part of the other incarnation of stage fright: the psychological manifestation.

Psychological manifestations of stage fright

Which comes first: the physiological manifestations or the psychological manifestations? It’s not always clear. My own stage fright in The Permanent Way began totally out of the blue with the physiological manifestations, and then – like an unstoppable avalanche – the psychological manifestations followed. Thereon in, the dialogue between the physical and the psychological was self-perpetuating. I’d think about getting nervous and my body would come up with the signs – and then I’d feel nervous, and my body would show more signs. And so it went on… Which is actually perfectly normal, given that as human beings we’re psychophysical. In other words, whatever happens in our body inextricably impacts our psyche, and whatever’s going on in our psyche inextricably affects our body. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of psychological stage fright is that it’s in our heads: it’s us creating our own distress, and that makes us feel as if we’re going crazy. So what triggers this strange self-sabotage?

The basic trigger for psychological stage fright is usually some kind of dislocation from the script. An interfering thought suddenly pops into our heads, and we find ourselves thinking about something other than just performing. And this can be the first warning sign of a more disruptive fracture in our consciousness. Here’s how: in everyday life, we have two ‘selves’ which normally collaborate very effectively so that we can go about our daily business. These two selves are known as the ‘functioning self’ and the ‘observing self’.20

The functioning self is the part of us that gets on with the task in hand. It enables us to live happily during a performance in our dual existence of kissing Antony while finding the light, facing downstage, and holding on to our headdress.

The observing self deals with any necessary adjustments. It responds with split-second timing to the coughing fit on the fifth row (if it’s theatre); it adapts our performance from the long-shot to the mid-shot to the close-up (if it’s film); it picks up the asp that just fell off the divan without interrupting the dialogue. And, at its best, our observing self is our invaluable ally. Yet at its worst, our observing self becomes a self-sabotaging demon, watching us objectively with an evil smirk. And, when psychological stage fright kicks in, that demon starts to create all kinds of unhelpful scenarios.

Sometimes in those scenarios we become overwhelmingly aware of our own body. Actions that we normally execute without even thinking – walking or sitting or picking up a cup – become trembly and self-conscious. As the beleaguered actress Nina bewails in Chekhov’s The Seagull, ‘I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know how to stand, I couldn’t control my voice.’21 With psychological stage fright, we become ‘helpless witnesses to our own malfunctioning’.²²

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Clearly, stage fright is not very pleasant – either physiologically or psychologically. Yet this is the first step in knowing our enemy: registering what it feels like when they’ve embarked on an attack. The next step is to look at why the attack happens in the first place. Why do we find the career that we love becoming the experience that we dread? One of the answers to this question lies in our evolution. So let’s go right back some 200,000 years…

Evolutionary provokers of stage fright

Picture this for a moment. We’re sitting in the mouth of our cave. Out there in the darkness, we see – or maybe only sense – blinking eyes staring back at us in silence. Far from being a rapt audience listening to our recounting of a brave day’s hunting, those eyes belong to creatures fathoming out whether or not to eat us. And the thought of being devoured triggers the most ancient part of our brain to spring into survival-mode action. That ancient part is the tiny, almond-shaped amygdala. So – in the briefest of briefs – what does the amygdala do?

Well, picture this for a moment. It’s another late-night scenario. A nervous young sentinel is sitting at the outpost, surrounded by darkness. With hyper-attentive vigilance, he suddenly sees a spark in the dark, and he rushes back to the camp shouting, ‘Alert! Alert! We’re under attack!’ ‘Nonsense,’ says the commander, knowingly. ‘That was just Carruthers lighting a cigarette.’ That twitchy sentinel is a bit like our amygdala. (‘The Vigilante’, I call him in Chapter 3.) It responds more quickly to a potential threat than the brain regions that emerged later in our evolution (the regions connected to our more sophisticated consciousness). So whether or not we actually need to fear a situation, the amygdala sends fear signals to our body and brain. What this can mean if we’re actors in the throes of performing a scene is that the amygdala senses all those eyes watching us (‘devouringly’) in the dark and it triggers our fear. Yet there’s nothing to be afraid of: there’s nothing out there to devour us. It’s only the audience and the ushers, or the camera crew and the director, watching us supportively as we do our work. Strange as it may seem, the fear of being watched is hardwired into our brain. Which means that when it comes to keeping cool under pressure, ‘Virtually by design, crowds are destined to make most of us want to flee the vicinity in terror.’²³

But as actors we can’t flee. We’re trapped – in the wings just about to make an entrance. Or on the stage in the middle of a scene. Or in front of the cameras with vast amounts of money dependent on our performance. And we’re not just trapped by the fact that we’ve got a job to do: the setting itself can hem us in. A traverse stage (with the audience on both sides), a thrust stage (with the audience on three sides), an arena (with the audience on all sides), or a film set (with crew, grips, floor managers, make-up teams and extras everywhere)… – You can see just how terrifying these environments can be when our primitive survival-mode kicks in. All eyes are on us and there’s no place to shelter. But even if we could escape, our normal coping strategies are on hold, as we’re not ‘ourselves’: we’re in the given circumstances of a fictional character. And our job requires that we behave in ways appropriate to that character. It’s the unavoidable ‘schizophrenia’ innate in our profession. And the very fact that, in the process of doing our job, we’re consciously dislocated from our own, personal behaviour patterns can be pretty traumatic.

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When you consider some of these innate, evolutionary fears that are built into our experience of public performance, stage fright is suddenly perfectly understandable and highly forgivable. And that’s just the start. That’s just the evolutionary stuff. What about the external realities attached to our profession that can potentially provoke our fear?

External provokers of stage fright

There are certain facts of the industry that can stir up our nerves. In fact, a degree of low-level anxiety underpins our whole profession, so we need to keep our wits about us. Here are just a couple of red flags.

Loss of control over our careers

When we sign up for a life as an actor, we essentially surrender our agency over our lives. (There’s a reason why our agents are called ‘agents’.) Unless we have a strong entrepreneurial streak – like Kenneth Branagh or Kevin Spacey – or the wherewithal to make our own work, we’re dependent on our agents, managers, directors and casting directors, and a whole host of other figures in production, commerce and administration to determine our personal destiny. If we’re not careful, we begin to feel like a leaf on a breeze, fluttering wherever the next gust takes us. We don’t book a vacation – just in case the phone rings and we get an audition. We commit to a family reunion – and, sure enough, the phone rings and we’ve got an audition. And as researchers into happiness have found, when we lose autonomy over our lives, the feeling in extreme circumstances can be devastating.24

We might be able to deal with the loss of autonomy – of when, where and whether the jobs come up – if it weren’t for the fact that there are so many variables in how the roles are actually cast. Which takes us to our second external provoker of stage fright: the vagaries of casting.

The vagaries of casting

The employment statistics in the acting industry have never been particularly encouraging. And it’s not just a matter of money. Any of us who have endured bouts of unemployment know that an actor without a job is like a soul without a body. Not knowing what to do with ourselves or how to channel our creative instincts when we’re out of work naturally makes us nervous and unhappy. ‘Inactivity and the feeling of helplessness are the greatest enemies of happiness.’²⁵ And our helplessness is exacerbated by employers not necessarily knowing what type of person they want for a role until a particular actor walks through the casting-room door and they suddenly go, ‘Yes – that’s it!’ We want to be versatile, so that we can make ourselves available for a wide range of jobs. Yet, at the same time, our agents – the major gatekeepers into our employment opportunities – have to categorise us in order to work most effectively for us. If your type is obvious – ‘beautiful juve’, ‘funny fat friend’, ‘muscular tough guy’ – then it’s easier to market the product that is ‘you’. As we become better known, the product that is ‘us’ can actually get us the work. The lucky few become a kind of brand – be it the ‘Eddie Redmayne’ or the ‘Carey Mulligan’ or the ‘George Clooney’, etc. But for many of us, it’s really not so clear.

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For some actors, the uncertainty of the industry is part of the kick. They don’t want to know what they’re doing next week, let alone next month or next year. They shy away from the restrictions of a ‘proper’ job. And they’re quite happy for their agents to deal with all their financial concerns. Yet it’s a hardened soul that isn’t at all affected by the loss of control and the vagaries of casting. And then these external factors can arouse internal feelings that also trigger our stage fright.

Internal provokers of stage fright

As Newton’s third law in physics tells us: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. It’s just the same with creativity. Anyone who has the capacity to be highly creative also has the capacity to be deeply destructive. And most of us as creative artists pendulum-swing somewhere between the two extremes. Sometimes we can control it, sometimes we can’t. So what are the inner, temperamental tendencies that can nudge us towards stage fright? If we know that they’re there, we can be on our guard…

Perfectionism

Every musician knows that a B flat can only be a B flat. It can’t be a B. It can’t be an A. There’s a precision to it, a perfection. Just so for the ballerina, as she drills the technicality of a pas de chat. Just so for the skater, as he executes a triple Salchow. But acting? Acting is messy. It’s an imperfect craft. It’s about expressing human behaviour. And human beings are chaotic – they’re unpredictable and contradictory. And, therefore, so is acting. Added to which, the technique of acting is endlessly variable because each of us has such an individual instrument. My voice, your anatomy, his emotional palette is entirely unique, so there can never be a definitive way of honing an actor’s instrument or interpreting a character. As a young Antony Sher discovered, ‘I had yet to learn the golden rule about acting – there isn’t one. No blueprint. No single technique.’26 It’s a reality we have to deal with: there is no blueprint, ergo there can be no perfect performance. Yet, so often as actors we ignore that reality. We’re high achievers. Ambition drives us. So we aspire to artistic perfectionism.

However, perfectionism and creativity are highly incompatible. In fact, psychologists Hewitt and Flett go so far as to say that perfectionism is a neurosis. A perfectionist personality (they suggest) subverts the very act of performance and ‘nothing good can ever come of perfectionism’.²⁷

In and of itself, aspiring to our best isn’t bad. The tricky thing with perfectionism, though – besides being impossible in acting – is that it can also tip us into self-sabotage. And that’s when stage fright can really make us feel as if we’re sending ourselves crazy.

Self-sabotage

Steve Blass was an ace pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates – until performance anxiety threatened his professional career. He described it as an imp hiding inside his body, sabotaging his every throw: ‘I could start the wind-up the way I wanted to, but then at the point of release it just froze. Way down deep, I’d say to myself, This is not going to work.’²⁸ And sure enough – he’d screw it up! Although this is a sports tale, any of us who have experienced severe stage fright will probably recognise the same inner imp. Our very own mind turns into our nemesis, our own inner terrorist, sabotaging our performance joy. Musician Stephen Nachmanovitch describes it as ‘a petty tyrant who has entered our lives’ and starts taunting us with judging inner voices that ‘throw doubt on whether we are good enough, smart enough, the right size or shape’.29

There’s a name for our inner imp’s judgemental voices. Psychopathologists call them ‘toxic introjects’, and they’re self-interruptions in the flow of our lives. Basically, there are two components to a toxic introject. First of all, there’s a content (i.e. a subject which is specifically forbidden). Then, allied to that content, there’s a catastrophic expectation (i.e. a threat that something awful will happen if we disobey the voice).³⁰ Unfortunately, our dialogue between the ‘forbidden content’ and the ‘catastrophic expectation’ can be woefully compelling: it can hook us in its thrall. And when we’re suffering stage fright, our toxic introjects can go in one of two equally compelling (though equally distressing) directions.

The first direction involves our judgemental, parental voice, warning us, ‘You’d better not screw up. You’d better not forget your lines. It’ll end your career.’ In this case, the ‘forbidden content’ is forgetting our lines. (After all, knowing the lines is the very least we’d expect of a professional actor.) The ‘catastrophic expectation’ is that we’ll ruin our career if we do forget them. (After all, if knowing the lines is the least we’d expect of a professional actor, then surely we don’t deserve to be called a professional actor if we do forget them!)

The other direction that our toxic introject can take is even more perplexing, as it’s less like the judging parent and more like the wicked child – not so much forbidding us as goading us. The ‘content’ becomes, ‘You’re going to forget your lines. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to humiliate yourself in front of this audience!’ (It really is the imp in our head.) The ‘catastrophic expectation’ becomes, ‘I knew you’d screw up. I knew I could wreck your performance. I knew you were nuts!!’ And this is the most toxic part of it: something in our brain knows that sabotaging ourselves so acutely – turning something that we love (i.e. acting) into something that we dread – is just plain crazy. Why would anybody do that to themselves?

And yet we do. But even more perversely (and this shows how cunning the Fear can be), any self-interruption can throw a spanner in the works. It doesn’t need to be a ‘negative’ thought. A ‘positive’ distraction can be just as self-sabotaging. How many times have we been onstage in the full swing of our acting and we’ve momentarily thought, ‘Hey, this is going well!’ only to find that this very thought seizes our attention away from the stage narrative, and we suddenly have no idea what we say next? It’s known as ‘self-enthrallment’.31 And in that moment of naive, narcissistic awareness of ‘Aren’t I good?’, we’re so pleased with what we just did that we forget what we’re supposed to do next. And that momentary lapse – even though it’s a ‘positive’ one – can just as easily bring on stage fright. In other words, we don’t have to be feeling anxious for stage fright to ambush us; on the contrary, we can be feeling just great. Yes, that’s how sneaky the Fear can be – all the more reason to ‘know the enemy’.

The truth of the matter is that these inner monologues merrily chatter away in our heads all the time in our everyday life, and yet we usually manage to function perfectly well. But when it comes to performing, we have to rein them in like wild mustangs. If those inner monologues become self-sabotaging, we also run the risk of (what’s known in performance psychology and sports psychology as) choking.

Choking

Choking is a little different from self-sabotage. With the inner monologue of self-sabotage, the audience may barely notice anything is amiss. With choking, it’s bloody obvious to everyone! The word anxiety actually ‘comes from the French anguere, meaning to choke, constrict, strangle, or cut off at the airway.’³² And the term ‘choking’ is used to describe what’s known in psychology as a ‘sub-optimal performance’. A sub-optimal performance is one in which we do worse than what we know we’re capable of doing, worse than we’ve done in the past, and worse than everyone – including ourselves – expects us to do now.33 It can only really happen in a stressful situation when the stakes are personally and professionally high. (It’s hardly likely to happen if we’re pootling through a practice of a performance alone in the back garden. No ‘devouring’ eyes are watching and there’s little to prove.) Whereas self-sabotage tends to manifest as an unseen, psychological phenomenon in our heads, choking tends to focus on our body and our movement. It might even bring us to a grinding halt. That’s why it’s so bloody obvious to everyone when it’s happening (as we’ll see in Chapter 2 with the tale of Paul Greenwood). So how does choking come to pass?

Whenever we learn a new task – such as a new song-and-dance routine or stage fight – we have to think about it consciously at first so that we can coordinate the various parts of our body. To do this, we use what’s known as our ‘short-term memory’ (also known as our ‘recent’ or ‘working’ memory). We’re actively thinking, ‘Where do my arms go? Where do my feet go? Is this a thrust or a parry?’ The more we rehearse the activity, the more accomplished we become. And maybe by the tenth time of doing the dance routine or the fight, we can integrate all of these coordinated actions without even thinking about them. This is because we’ve now lodged them in our ‘long-term memory’ (also known as our ‘implicit’ or ‘explicit’ memory, depending on the nature of the memory). (Just note for the moment that our long-term memory is housed in the region of our brain known as the ‘prefrontal cortex’. We’ll look at all this in greater detail in Chapter 3 when we unpack the processes of learning.)

What happens with choking is that the information we’ve lodged in our implicit long-term memory – through all those hours of practice and endless repetitions – suddenly becomes yanked out of that implicit (unconscious) memory and plonked back into our explicit (conscious) memory. The result is that we start to think about it too much – and so we screw it up. We choke. We suffer from what psychologists call paralysis by analysis – because now we’re overthinking what our brain already knows. What this means when we’re acting is that we may suddenly become overly aware of our movements. (‘Is this where I normally do the shuffle-step-ball-change? Is this where I parry his attack?’) Or we may start to question the words of the text. (‘Is that the right word? Does that sound right?’) And actively questioning what we already know scares the bejesus out of us.

We worsen our paralysis if we start presuming that the audience knows how afraid we are. We think they can see right through our mask of confidence. We imagine that they’re judging how well we’re managing to keep our demons at bay. ‘Or will tonight be the night when we screw it all up? Oh, the audience will love that, won’t they? They’d love to see us fail!’ We unwittingly turn the audience into our adversaries. And, as these negative thoughts thicken, every waking moment – even when we’re not on stage – becomes a living nightmare (as we saw with Richard Seer in the Introduction). We can’t just go about our usual routines because we’re too busy anticipating what we’re afraid might happen in tonight’s performance. This anticipation in and of itself can put us into choke-mode hours before the actual show. It’s those pesky imps in our brain again. And when those imps are let loose on stage, they don’t just cause us to screw up our well-rehearsed words and actions: they can actually make us believe that we’re going to do something way more inappropriate…

Loss of inhibition

It was the second night of Nell Dunn’s Steaming at the Swan Theatre, Worcester, and I was playing Josie, the foul-mouthed hooker. The build-up to the production had been quite intense, as the play involved several of us stripping down to our Naughty Naked Nude. Consequently, the adrenalin rush at the first performance had been pretty huge. To my great surprise, however, I’d actually loved the experience – and the second night promised to be a breeze.

So, on that second night – as I came launching in for the scene in which I take off all my clothes – I delivered the first sentence of a highly strung rant of a speech and… Instead of saying the playwright’s text, out of my mouth came words of dubious origin. I think I might even have said (though I can’t actually remember), ‘I’ve no idea what I’m talking about…’ It was the only other time in my life that I’ve suffered sudden and unexpected stage fright.

I must have finished the speech all right, as my onstage partner continued with her cue as if everything were perfectly fine. Yet, in the moment of screwing up my lines, I had to rein myself in like a wild horse to stop myself from turning to the audience and saying, ‘What are you all looking at? Have you any idea of the hell I’m going through up here?’ This kind of temporary sense of loss of inhibition – this dreamlike quality of ‘What the fuck?!’ – is a real shock to the system. And it can lead us to believe that we’re going seriously nuts.

Mercifully, it’s actually a very common experience. In fact, psychotherapist Alvin R. Mahrer describes its many facets: ‘There is a fear of losing control, of giving up that moment-by-moment control that is almost always there. There is a fear of becoming uncivilised, out of control, wild, animal-like. There is a fear of craziness, lunacy, derangement, losing your mind.’34 And there are some reassuring explanations for why we suddenly find ourselves in this uncivilised derangement. ‘When the stress is on,’ explains cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, ‘working memory and the prefrontal cortex can be compromised and our inhibition is one of the first things to go.’³⁵ Not only does the prefrontal cortex house our long-term memory (as I noted earlier), it’s also the seat of our ability to appraise a situation. So when stage fright attacks us, our ability to appraise what we’re doing becomes compromised: ‘Handling yourself appropriately under pressure involves recognizing when your prefrontal cortex is most likely to resemble that of a teenage brain and applying effective techniques to deal with the regression.’36

So that’s what’s happening! We momentarily regress into a ‘What the fuck?!’ teenager! It’s a blessed relief to discover that we’re not alone in feeling these sudden unleashings of primitive, chaotic voices in our head. What’s more, we’re not going mad. We’re just experiencing one of the effects of the chemicals released in our brain when our body is under stress. In fact, an actor once told me of his stage fright during a schools tour, which manifested as a barely controllable desire to face the nine-year-old audience and yell, ‘Fuck the lot of you!’ He was so worried about this maniacal voice in his head that he decided to go for therapy. For any of us who have grappled with that anarchic inner monologue, it’s such a relief to know that we’re not crazy. We’re perfectly normal. We’re just dealing with our brain’s complex hard-wiring. A deep breath, a moment of reappraisal – and that teenage brain will sober up.

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So there we have it. Assessment 1 complete. We’ve laid out the battle plan. We’ve studied how the war is waged. We’ve seen how stage fright manifests itself both physiologically and psychologically. We’ve looked at some of the evolutionary, external, and internal provokers of stage fright. So now Assessment 2 involves us analysing The Nature of Fear itself. As we encounter the enemy, we see it has various subdivisions – which I’m going to call the ‘Fear Family’. They include worry, anxiety, stress and (even) depression. That may sound like a grim cohort of adversaries. Yet, as ever, forewarned is forearmed. If we can lay these adversaries out on the map in the war room, we can understand them better and diminish their potential threat. Onwards…

Assessment 2: The Nature of Fear

Let’s start by getting a few things straight. Who is this enemy? And what do we need to know about the Fear? Here are four quick insights into how it generally operates.

Four things we need to know about fear

First of all, we’re conditioned as human beings to be afraid of fear. It’s one of our six fundamental emotions (along with anger, disgust, happiness, sadness and surprise) – and much of the world runs on our fear of fear. Burglar alarms, insurance policies, medications, airport security systems, Ebola-avoidance tactics, earthquake drills – you name it. But fear befuddles us. ‘No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.’37 (So said philosopher Edmund Burke back in the 1700s.) Which is why we’re conditioned to be afraid – it can bypass much of our reason so that we don’t question things too much!

Yet, the second point to note is that (despite our deliberate battle talk in this chapter) fear itself has no sinister intentions. How can it have? We know it’s not really an ugly homunculus sitting inside our head – a pesky imp or a monster or a demon. In fact, fear is nothing but a series of physiological activities. And those activities are highly helpful. They’re designed to equip us to deal with danger and get us to safety quickly, so we should be incredibly grateful for fear. It makes all our major decisions for us. It gives particular meaning to our achievements. It makes us feel more alive.³⁸ It even improves our performance: we’ve known for more than a hundred years that human performance actually peaks when we hit an optimal nervous activation.³⁹ So, we shouldn’t be afraid of fear. It’s an albeit primitive means of ensuring that we don’t just survive – we actually thrive.

But this is the third thing we have to note: fear is primitive. And that’s part of the stage-fright problem. As we’ve already seen, it’s triggered in the ancient part of our brain known as the amygdala. On one level, this tiny little security system is amazing. It’s designed to automatically override every other conscious thought in our head so that – right this minute, in this danger – we survive. And we survive by doing one of three things: we freeze, flee or fight. That’s great – but on another level, it’s very primitive. It’s primitive because this fear system is designed for hunter-gatherers – and obviously we’re not hunter-gatherers any more. So, there are times when the amygdala makes us take a particular action – like freeze, flee or fight – when the circumstances don’t require us to do anything quite so drastic. Certainly not as actors. And certainly not in the theatre. Let’s be honest: our average audience is hardly going to harm us, let alone kill us.

And this is the fourth thing we need to note about fear: it can’t tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined threat. For all our technological advancements in the twenty-first century, our subconscious is still too primitive to tell the difference between reality and imagination. In fact, sometimes we’re even more scared of what we imagine than what we actually perceive.40 Think of those vivid nightmares from which we awake with pounding heart and shallow breath and sweating body – as if we really were being chased by the Russian drug cartel even though we’re snug in bed. And it’s the same with our attitude towards an audience. If we think they’re worth being afraid of, then that’s exactly what we’ll do. In fact, our fear response is so primitive that we can condition ourselves to be frightened of something that’s absolutely neutral,⁴¹ like a house spider, or going on stage. Neither of them is a real threat. They’re both quite benign – if not rather magical.

So those are four quick insights into fear to help us understand how it operates. We know it affects our mind. And we know it fuels our imagination. So now let’s get to the nitty-gritty of what it does to our body. Let’s unpack those physiological manifestations that we listed at the start of this chapter.

What’s going on in our body when our fear system revs up?

The answer is: a lot!

When our body thinks we’re in danger, a huge amount of physiological activity immediately kicks in. After all, we might have to flee or fight, so we’d better be ready to respond. To which end, more blood pumps through our arteries and our breathing quickens, in order that a surge of adrenalin can send more glucose and oxygen straight to our large muscle groups. (That’s good. Now our arms and legs are charged with energy ready for emergency action.) Then the blood vessels on the surface of our skin constrict so that our skin grows pale and slightly numb. (That’s good. It’s like a temporary layer of armour. Now we’re less likely to hurt or bleed if we’re injured in the possible fight or flight.) Arteries – lungs – blood – muscles – limbs – skin! That’s a lot of instantaneous and all-consuming activity. No wonder fear makes us feel more alive. That’s exactly what it’s trying to do – keep us alive.

The downside of all this major preparation for action is that our more intricate motor skills are seriously impaired. And that’s why stage fright is a major screw-up for us as actors. Suddenly we can’t hold our props. Why not? Because the blood flow to our skin is constricted, so our hands have become shaky and clammy. Suddenly we’ve got a kaleidoscope of butterflies beating inside our queasy tummy. Why? Because eating isn’t a priority at this moment, so our digestive processes are shutting down. Suddenly our mouth is as dry as cotton wool. Why? Because we’re not eating, so we don’t need saliva for breaking down food. But worst of worst: our bowels feel like they’re going to explode and we seem to be dying for a pee all the time. Why, oh why? Because we might have to run away, so we need to keep ourselves as light as possible by jettisoning any extra weight.42 (‘Any extra weight? But I only had a banana for supper!’) As if all that wasn’t traumatic enough, now our pupils are dilating so that our vision is heightened in case we have to see our passage of escape. But the only thing it’s doing in the end is making us see more clearly those audience members – sitting out there, ravenously gazing from the cavernous darkness of the auditorium!

But it doesn’t stop there! This survival activity isn’t just physical – it’s profoundly neurological. So our conscious mind gets hauled into the action, too. If we’re seriously under threat, our mind needs to keep things as simple as possible, so that we only have to make one basic choice: flee or fight? Anything more complex and we could be dead by the time we’ve thought it through. In other words, our ability to process any complex, neurological challenges totally plummets. This is a disaster if we’re trying to act. How on earth can we do our job if we can’t process complex, neurological challenges – like remembering our lines and engaging with the script’s emotional nuances?

And it doesn’t stop there. If you’ve ever felt light-headed when you’ve been attacked by stage fright (as I certainly did in The Permanent Way), it’s because in big-fear, real-life, stress situations, our neural framework often maxes out. It’s almost as if the whole fear experience is far too monumental for our brain to compute.⁴³ So instead of trying to process whatever’s going on, our brain ensures that we don’t have to process anything. And so we faint – or freeze – or at least, we come close to it. (Which, I suppose, is why I felt in The Permanent Way that I was in a strange floating-away place.)

With so much going on chemically and neurologically in our bodies and brains, it’s no wonder we experience stage fright like some massive, inner earthquake. Because it is! Which is why we have to seek ways of befriending the Fear so that we can lessen its grip. If we don’t, its long-term effect on our lives can be very destructive – both physically and mentally. On the subject of which, it’s time to encounter some of the members of the Fear Family, as they can play a major role in how we deal with stage fright. We start with worry – as he’s the kind of kid brother, the easiest to handle.

Worry

Worry is the result of our imagination going haywire. It grabs onto an event that might hold some potential threat, and it starts up a Fear Voice, conjuring up all kinds of things that might happen in some imaginary future. And thus it morphs that event into something way out of proportion with reality. In other words, worry doesn’t process fear: it incubates it.44 And there are three main reasons for facing our worry – otherwise, it can be very unhelpful to us as actors.

First of all, worry mutes our emotional expressiveness. That’s not a great thing for us as actors, either for interpreting characters or for our long-term career trajectories. If we let a worry-monologue burble away, we become afraid of putting ourselves into experiences that we might find unsettling, and then we don’t give ourselves the chance to overcome those worries. So we don’t take that bold choice in rehearsals, in case we look stupid. So we don’t talk to that director in the bar, in case they think we’re coming on to them for a job. So we don’t call our agent and tell them about a casting that we’ve just heard about, in case they say we’re not pretty enough/young enough/famous enough (delete as appropriate). And thus we restrict our chances to expand our self-expression.

Second, worrying takes up our vital short-term memory – memory that we could otherwise be using for relevant activities, such as learning our lines. After all, our brain is not so different from the storage system on our computers. We only have a certain amount of active memory available to us at any one time. So we don’t want to clog it up with useless ramblings about fantasised, apocalyptic futures. (Unlike our computers, we don’t have pop-up blockers in our head to stop the junk coming in; therefore, we have to do it consciously.)

Third, it’s impossible for us to ‘talk’ with two voices at once. This is especially important for us to remember when we’re performing. Whether it’s an inner worry-monologue or an actual spoken script, those voices are language-based and, therefore, they both use the same neural networks in our brain. It’s a bit like a telephone connection: only one party can come through at a time. So if we’ve got a powerful, inner worry-monologue telling us that we just screwed up a scene, then it’s taking up the ‘telephone line’ that we should be using to deliver our character’s text. This is double-whammy self-sabotage. Not only are we sending ourselves criticising messages that are totally non-conducive to giving a great performance, but we’re also draining our brain of vital horsepower to do the very job that we’re supposed to be doing.

There’s no denying that the worry-monologue can really screw us up as actors, which is why we have to keep an ear out for the kid brother. Otherwise, it can foment in the long term a more persistent anxiety.

Anxiety

A close cousin of worry, anxiety is way more pernicious: it’s a busy activity that significantly affects our nervous system. In very simple terms, our nervous system has two sides. One is known as ‘the sympathetic nervous system’ and it’s our on-switch (if we feel under threat, it switches us to ‘alert’, and makes us ready to fight or flee). The other is known as ‘the parasympathetic nervous system’ and it’s our off-switch (it calms us down, relaxes us, and helps us go to sleep at night). As we go about our daily life, the actions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems ‘are always in balance, one tending to dominate the other according to what we need to do.’45 If something is worrying us – ‘Did I finish my tax return?’ – it’s usually fairly easy to remedy the situation and turn the switch to off.

What happens when we’re anxious is that our on-switch becomes stuck. And when we’re stuck in on, our concerns start to snowball and the results soon manifest themselves. For example, suppose we’re about to go on stage and we’re suffering performance anxiety: that anxiety shows up in three different ways. We have a mental response (which only we can know as it’s inside our head, but it’s usually along the lines of, ‘I’m going to screw up!’). We have a behavioural response (which other people can see as they notice us muttering our lines or pacing backstage like a tiger). And we have a physiological response (which are the changes we’ve talked about already: the sweating palms, the butterflies, and all the other reactions of our body to the fight-or-flight dilemma). So, like I say, anxiety is a pretty busy activity.

What’s more, it’s totally antithetical to acting. Most of us love acting because it gives us a heightened state of presence, a real in-the-moment aliveness. Anxiety, on the other hand, is all about the future – a future full of anticipated, negative outcomes. So it’s impossible for us to be present and to be anxious at the same time. So which would we rather experience? Pleasurable engagement with the present-tense experience of the onstage storytelling? Or anxiety-drenched focus on an imagined, calamitous future? It’s another no-brainer, isn’t it? We’ll uncover some strategies for ‘tripping the switch’ throughout this book, but for the moment our task in encountering the Fear Family is to understand how unhelpful they are. And not just unhelpful, but unhealthy.

Indeed, one of the most compelling reasons for confronting our anxiety is that it’s closely related to long-term stress – and that can be very damaging to our body.

Stress

Stress is a bad boy in the family. Stress involves chemicals. And those chemicals can cause us real harm. So how does that come to pass?

As human beings, we need certain challenges to keep us motivated and excited. It’s how we learn and grow. So we take on a Shakespeare role – or we feature in an action movie. Yet when a challenging situation overwhelms us and we can no longer meet that challenge, our system is chronically and repeatedly exposed to adrenalin and stress hormones (such as cortisol). In other words, stress is the chemical result that arises when we find a situation emotionally or physically challenging and we don’t know how to deal with it. So stress doesn’t just affect our brain (like the voices of worry and anxiety do), stress actually changes our brain. And most disruptively for us as actors, it causes serious, long-term memory problems. When we’re stressed, various networks in our brain (that would normally work together to help us with our reasoning) stop cooperating with each other. And ‘this can have dire consequences for our thinking and our memory capabilities.’46 Obviously that’s bad news for us as actors.

The reason that we have to be on our guard against stress is that it increases over time. Fear can actually come and go pretty quickly: it’s acute and obvious. (Like the adrenalin rush as we slam on the brakes to avoid the plastic bag on the motorway that we momentarily thought was a dog – the fear arrives in a nanosecond and goes within minutes.) But stress is chronic and subtle. Over time, it floods our body with more and more toxins which impede our mental and physical efficiency. So we can’t ignore it. In fact, if we don’t face our stage fright, the stress that arises can be hugely detrimental to our brain. Stress and a healthy brain are incompatible. Stress and pleasure, likewise. Which is why we should talk about our stage fright and air our anxieties (as we discussed in the Introduction). Because if we don’t… our stress can worsen and then depression can darken our life.

Depression

Depression is like Masha in The Seagull. Always in black. In mourning for her life. Pinching snuff and swigging vodka and hiding in the shadows. So how does depression descend upon us? Basically, when stress builds up chronically and lasts for a long time, the stress hormones don’t disappear from our body. They linger in our system, causing significant chemical imbalances. And when our brain becomes heavily imbalanced, depression can set in.

With depression, our brain loses its adaptability.47 It’s no longer nimble and curious and excitable. We don’t want to seize new opportunities, face new challenges, learn new speeches, or meet new casting directors. Instead, a kind of melancholy state of rigidity sets in, paralysing all our va-va-voom and hardening our depressive condition like a rock. And in this ossified, depressive state, our brain continues to imagine and create threats that simply don’t exist. The future can seem like an endless tunnel of unemployment or unfulfilling bit parts. We become increasingly despondent about our powerlessness to carve out a professional path. And, even when we’re in a job, we talk ourselves into believing that the director doesn’t think we’re up to the job and so we look for ways to get out of the job. When we’re stuck in these dark and ossified states, we just can’t seem to shift the blackness.

*

Now you see the enemies that we’re up against. And how important it is that we disempower them – especially given the nature of our industry where they could so easily and subtly claim terrain. We’re the general in this war room, figuring out who’s where and what they’re doing, and – if they’ve already made inroads to our territory – how we can best stop them in their tracks. But before we draw close enough to face the foe through the rest of this book, we ought to consider the actual nature of the general in this war: i.e. us and our own capabilities. After all, ‘Know the enemy and know yourself: and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.’

But who exactly is ‘us’? That’s a hard enough question to answer in everyday life, let alone as actors. Let alone when we’re suffering stage fright. We’ve already noted that when stage fright hits, it’s like an ambush. It’s a force so great that we can temporarily forget who we are. And our normal degree of professional dual consciousness can fragment into myriad pieces. Time, then, for Assessment 3: to take a look at who we are before we’re fractured so that we can understand what to do if we become fractured.

Assessment 3: The Nature of Us

It’s not surprising that, when we suffer stage fright, it can feel as though our whole sense of self is disintegrating. Our job is challenging enough under normal circumstances. In the throes of performance, we’re multitasking like mad. We’ve got four identities that we’re juggling simultaneously, and they’re spread across all four points of our own inner compass.

First of all, we’ve got our self – our own personality. (This will determine how we interpret a part. So Ralph Fiennes will make different choices about Richard III from Antony Sher or Al Pacino. Mariah Gale will make different choices about Ophelia from Helena Bonham Carter or Kate Winslet. And directors often cast us specifically because they want the choices that come most naturally to our particular imagination.)

Second, we’ve got the role – the writer’s creation. (This will bring out different aspects of our individual personality. For example, my Masha will be different from my Mad Margaret, which will be different from my Mrs Cratchit or my Maria Marten.)

So the ‘self’ and the ‘role’ form the north–south pole. And there’s a kind of symbiotic relationship between the two of them: ‘I’ll bring out these qualities in the role, and the role will bring out these qualities in me.’

Third, we’ve got the technician – the actor. (This is one half of our dual consciousness: the half that knows we have to deliver the lines, hit the mark, find the prop, and tell the story.)

Finally, we’ve got the character in performance. (This is the other half of our dual consciousness: the half that immerses us in the flow of the show, finding the rhythms each night, feeling the emotions afresh, and connecting to our onstage partners.)

The ‘technician’ and the ‘character in performance’ form the east–west pole. (We referred to it earlier as the collaboration between the observing self and the functioning self.)

So you can see there’s a lot going on here. And at the centre of the compass of these four points is just us: our body, our imagination, our emotional palette, and our voice. So, in the throes of performance, there’s a complex balancing act that’s taking place inside what’s already a complex consciousness.

But what exactly is consciousness? And who exactly are we? To unlock this thorny issue, we’re going to use a simple analogy. Just imagine for a moment that each one of us comprises all the generals in the war-room setting out to battle with stage fright. So we’re not just one general – we’re actually three.

General number 1: our protoself

At the centre of our war room stands the perfect general. The general who never gets flustered. His task isn’t to think about the enemy or work out the strategy or worry over the consequences. His task is simply to make sure that everything is just fine. So simple is his task that it requires no conscious awareness. In fact, it may surprise you to know that ‘who we are’ actually starts at a place of no consciousness. Let’s turn to the major pioneer of consciousness studies – psychologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio – to unpack this analogy…

Every moment (and usually without us thinking about it), our body is beavering away looking after us, making sure that we’re doing okay as a living organism. (‘Am I warm? Am I cool? Am I comfortable? Am I breathing?’) And at the heart of this activity is our protoself. Our protoself is a kind of Zen master extraordinaire in a place of pure existence. It has no powers of perception. It holds no knowledge. It doesn’t interpret anything. In other words, it actually has no consciousness of its own – because it doesn’t know that it knows anything. It simply offers reference points, such as ‘pain in rib’ or ‘light in eyes’ or ‘grumbling in tummy’. And it leaves it to another part of our brain to interpret that information and to act upon it accordingly: ‘Loosen corset between acts.’ ‘Move out of partner’s follow-spot.’ ‘Remember to eat in the interval.’

The protoself’s only concern is our organism’s physiological balance in the world (otherwise known as our ‘homeostasis’). It just makes sure that we’re doing fine. So our protoself (as Damasio proposes) is very stable, which is very reassuring. After all, when it comes to the chaos of stage fright, it’s good to know that there’s an innate, primordial, non-emotional, non-thinking aspect of our existing selves – let’s call him ‘General Protoself’ – that gets on with keeping us safe. You could say that, however destabilised the ambush of stage fright may make us feel, it’s actually extremely difficult for us to completely self-sabotage. Stage fright really won’t kill us.

General number 2: our core self

Next we have the general whom we always send out into the battlefield, because he is totally instinctive and intuitive about the manoeuvres in the very moment they occur. Let’s draw from Damasio’s nomenclature and call him ‘General Core Self’. Our core self is what we experience instantaneously here and now. It’s that split-second awareness that we’re conscious that we’re conscious: we’re not just feeling or doing something, we’re aware that we’re feeling or doing it. In that split second, three things happen. Through one of our senses (sight, sound, taste, touch or smell), we encounter an object in the environment (say, a skull). Instantaneously, through all of our brain’s electrochemical circuitry, it constructs a mental map of that object (an image of a skull). Automatically, we discover a relationship between the object and ourselves (‘Oh! This is a skull! Must speak the Yorick line!’). And these three steps take place in the blink of an eye. When as actors we really feel we’re ‘in the moment’ of a performance, you could say that in many ways it’s our core self at work. It’s unencumbered by any sense of past or future. Which is why we come off stage and we can’t necessarily remember what we did – and we certainly didn’t pre-plan it. It seemed to happen there and then, and it’s a very exciting state to be in when we’re acting because there’s a real ‘flow’.

That said, this state can only exist if we have a bigger picture sense of self to back up our courage to take these in-the-moment risks. Which leads us to our next level of consciousness, our next general in the war room…

General number 3: our autobiographical self

‘Love is a battlefield,’ belted Pat Benatar as she topped the charts in 1983. Well, life can be something of a battlefield, too. And the only way we can fully negotiate its twists and turns – its minefields and peace treaties – is to have a sense of the bigger picture. Arguably the most powerful general in our war room – in fact, he’s probably a field marshall – is the one that truly understands battle strategy. That means he can recall what happened in the past, he can anticipate what might happen in the future, and he can draw everything together into a comprehensive, narrative sequence. That narrative sequence is what we experience as our life, and this state of conscious existence is what Damasio calls our autobiographical self.

Our autobiographical self is made up of all our actions, memories, desires, pleasures and pains. In other words, it’s the total sum of our life experiences, including things that are still in our imagination, such as the plans we’ve made for the future.48 With lightning speed, ‘General Autobiographical Self’ juggles past, present and future, configuring this vast mass of information and assessing how we might make sense of each and every moment. It’s literally mind-boggling how, in a nanosecond, all this information and memory is coordinated on a multi-site network right across our brain – a bit like some central command station in a Mission Impossible movie.

What makes this process even more amazing is that our memories aren’t static. They’re constantly being modified and remodelled as we negotiate the world, even when we’re dreaming. Every single moment of our lives, our brain is constructing and reconstructing who we are through an astonishing number of integrated, electrochemical operations. Half the time, we don’t even know that we’re remodelling ourselves. It depends on all kinds of things: where we are, what we’ve eaten, who we’re with, and what we’re drinking. This constant modifying and remodelling gives rise to an extraordinary mercurialness. We can ‘vary and waver, succumb to vanity and betray, be malleable and voluble,’ writes Damasio. ‘The potential to create our own Hamlets, Iagos and Falstaffs is inside each of us.’⁴⁹ You can see that, the more we discover about our consciousness, the more astonishing it is that we ever keep a sense of ‘who we are’! In fact, the only way we can keep a sense of who we are is by having some kind of stable core, or (as Damasio calls it) a ‘home base’ to come back to: ‘We can be Hamlet for a week, or Falstaff for an evening, but we tend to return to home base. If we have the genius of Shakespeare, we can use the inner battles of the self to create the entire cast of characters in Western theater’.50 So you see, we’ve all got multiple personalities – whether or not we’re actors.

Suffice it to say, this whole interaction of the various generals – our protoself, our core self and our autobiographical self – is a staggering neurobiological process when we’re just being ourselves in everyday life, let alone when we’re working on a role. When our professional life is devoted to incarnating these multiple personalities – when we’re professional ‘schizophrenics’, so to speak – we have to be mindful about where ‘home base’ is. No wonder our sense of self fragments when we’re ambushed by the panic of stage fright: it’s a mutable self in the first place. For us to really understand our capabilities as a warrior, we should take a quick look at what’s happening when all is well and we’re in a personal ‘peacetime’. Then we can better understand how to handle the situation when all is not well and our stage fright backs us to the edge of an abyss…

When it’s all going well: a healthy dual consciousness

As actors, we’re consciously and deliberately shifting between the ‘home base’ of ourselves and the canon of global theatre. So, in the duration of an actual performance (as we’ve already established), we have to have a keen sense of dual consciousness (a key tool in Stanislavsky’s toolkit). We have to be able to commit to the character’s given circumstances (with our functioning self) while handling the technical demands of performance (with our observing self). As actor-director Joseph Chaikin pithily puts it, it’s a ‘balancing act of abandonment and control, of intelligence and innocence.’⁵¹ And this balancing act is a crucial part of our craftsmanship as actors. We might be giving the most wonderful rendition of Hamlet, but if we keep turning our back to the audience, then no one will see what we’re doing. We could be giving an Oscar-winning performance in the next Tarantino movie, but if we keep stepping out of the frame, then we wreck our chances. So we have to be absolutely clear that there’s no contradiction between being conscious that we’re on stage or in front of the camera, and being immersed in the role. Stanislavsky himself describes how he divided himself, as it were, into two personalities: ‘One continued as an actor, the other was an observer. Strangely enough this duality not only did not impede, it actually promoted my creative work. It encouraged and lent impetus to it.’52

So what happens when it all goes wrong? What happens when our consciousness isn’t just divided into two? When, instead, it fragments into pieces and we find ourselves teetering on the edge of an abyss?

Stage fright and the abyss of fragmented consciousness

As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, there’s usually one reason why our consciousness fragments on stage. Some inner interference pops into our thoughts – and diverts the flow away from what we’re doing in the role (‘What shall I have for supper?’ ‘Did I just miss my cue?’ ‘She never says that line like that.’ ‘That sounded like my agent’s laugh.’ ‘Oh, goodness, what do I say next?’). If the glitch is momentary and the threat to our performance isn’t severe, then pretty quickly we can refocus our attention back to the task in hand. If, however, we allow the threat to throw us off-course – or worse, to explode in our imaginations like a bomb – then we’re in deep trouble. Now ‘some amount of attention will have to be mobilised to eliminate the danger, leaving less attention free’ to deal with our acting.⁵³ So a kind of inner conflict-of-interests starts up in our head. Instead of getting on with our performance, we start to fixate on our screw-up and then on the audience. And (as we’ve seen) it doesn’t take much for our fantasies about the audience to accelerate quickly into the ‘rampantly (paranoid) delusional’⁵⁴ – and they become devouring wolves. The next thing is there’s a quaking in our innards and there’s chaos in our mind. And now suddenly we have an overwhelming sense of being on the edge of an abyss – a deep, alluring darkness – into which tumbling seems to be the inescapable end to this impasse.

The edge of that abyss between our self and the character – between our reality and the world of the play – can be truly terrifying. In fact, it’s amazing how often the image of an abyss springs up in reference to stage fright. As psychologist Kirk J. Schneider describes it, stage fright ‘opens us to the primal forces, emotions, blood, upheaval. Where safety once permeated, now we must fend for ourselves; where a smile once warmed us, now there is a cold abyss.’55 Indeed, in a moment of awful stage fright at the National Theatre, Olympia Dukakis felt herself, ‘actually pitch into a black hole. My body just jerked forward as if I was falling into a pit.’⁵⁶ A sense of vertigo – as Antony Sher experienced in Japan – is one of the most powerful symptoms of stage fright. And, for those of us who’ve experienced it, there’s a kind of strange lure that almost urges us to fall into this place of unknowing… as if we’re drunk or drugged or lost in a fantasy world. In defiance of that lure, Laurence Olivier famously said: ‘I have been there, I have looked over the edge, and I have returned.’⁵⁷

When we’re standing on the edge of this abyss, it’s curious how often we experience a gap in time. Yet what seems to last a lifetime for us is less than a moment in the audience’s awareness. That moment’s hesitation, that tiny gap (as director Ingemar Lindh points out) is the gap between what we intended to do and what we actually did.⁵⁸ We intended to say one word, but instead another word came out of our mouths. We intended to deliver our monologue, but instead another thought popped into our heads. That tiny gap between what we intended to do and what we actually did becomes this abyss full of self-evaluation, self-doubt, and self-consciousness. That’s certainly a lot of ‘self’ filling up that abyss. Which could mean that it needn’t be a terrifying image, after all. It could actually be a very useful one. Here’s why…

We’ve already noted that our experience of life is the result of a lot of electrochemical activity going on in our brain. We’ll look at this in greater detail in Chapter 3, but the main point to note here is that our sense of self – our consciousness – is actually created in the gaps between our neurons… That’s an extraordinary thought, so let’s take it slowly…

Our neurons are extremely communicative. They send tiny messages to each other via sites (or junctions) called ‘synapses’. And it’s through all those tiny electrochemical messages – those leaps across the synaptic dark – that we experience everything that makes us ‘us’. Our memories, images, impulses to actions, feelings, sensations, and emotional activity. It has even been said that we only exist in the gaps within our brain: we are born in a synaptic cleft.

When you think of it like that, it’s not surprising that stage fright can feel as if we’re falling into an abyss. We’ve got all these millions of gaps with which we have to contend neurologically on a nanosecond-to-nanosecond basis – in order just to exist! And yet at the same time it’s a very empowering image. After all, those gaps aren’t dark and empty abysses in which we might lose ourselves – they’re actually very full of ‘us’. You could almost say that in those moments of stage-fright ‘gap’, we’re most deeply connected to our selves. We’re at our most true – most authentic – most honest. No mask, no funny voice or honed gait to disguise us.

If we look at the situation like this, there’s potentially a way of turning ‘The Gap’ into something to welcome, rather than something to fear. We know those gaps are natural and necessary. Therefore, if we can’t avoid them, we might as well face them – just as that tiny electrochemical message in our brain faces the gap as it leaps out into the synaptic dark. In fact, one of the most useful acting tools I know is David Mamet’s ‘terrifying unforeseen’.59 Entering the terrifying unforeseen is the moment of stepping out on the stage or in front of the camera and not knowing exactly what will happen. Like the Fool in the tarot cards stepping off the mountain in the hopes that the ground will come up and meet him, let’s have the foolish courage to step into the terrifying unforeseen.

Acting with Courage

Yes, indeed – acting takes courage. It takes hard work. It takes commitment and unremitting dedication. And it costs us a lot. When we pursue the life of an artist, ‘illusions are stripped away,’ writes Stephen Nachmanovitch, ‘we confront difficult pieces of self-knowledge… we have to stretch our physical, emotional, intellectual stamina to the limits… our patience and our ability to persevere and transcend ourselves are tested.’⁶⁰ Acting requires all of our being and it consumes our whole life – and that can be scary. So, yes indeed – acting takes courage. And the natural pendulum-swing that counterbalances courage is – inevitably – fear.

Our fear and our courage coexist. They’re two sides of the same coin. So they both need embracing. To which end, David Mamet’s words on the subject are provocative and inspiring:

The actor before the curtain, the soldier going into combat, the fighter into the arena, the athlete before the event, may have feelings of self-doubt, fear, or panic. These feelings will or will not appear, and no amount of ‘work on the self’ can eradicate them.

The rational individual will, when the bell rings, go out there anyway to do the job she said she was going to do. This is called courage.⁶¹

As Mamet says, we won’t eradicate our fears, but we can learn to live with them. We can even learn to live with the vulnerability of very public stage fright, as Olympia Dukakis found out: ‘Pretty soon you get to the point where you realize that you can live with people knowing a lot of things about you that you thought you couldn’t reveal.’62 To which end, I finish this chapter with some thoughts about two actors who suffered terrible stage fright and yet lived with it and fought it with courage. So much so, they’ve become the major pioneers of contemporary Western acting: they were Konstantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg. While I was preparing this book, I took another look at each of their works and realised with renewed insight that maybe the very reason they formulated their acting methods was that they were both acute sufferers of stage fright. Had they not been, they might never have needed to come up with their revolutionary systems in the first place. So, clearly, there are some highly productive benefits to stage fright.

Konstantin Stanislavsky and stage fright

This may come as a surprise to know, but, throughout his acting life, Stanislavsky experienced an uncomfortable dialogue between himself as an actor and his audience. Early on in his career, he realised that he was (what he called) a character actor, not a personality actor. As long as he could create characters that were very different from himself – big noses, altered voices, unusual gaits – he felt confident on stage. To base a character on himself – to be ‘truthful’ to his own personality – required far more faith in himself than he felt he possessed. He was actually a remarkably reserved person, and in biographer Jean Benedetti’s words, ‘He needed the protection of another individual’s identity and mask of make-up’.⁶³ Over time, however, he became increasingly frustrated with his own strutting and posturing on stage. You get the sense from his writings and photographs that he wasn’t always the subtlest of actors. And maybe he knew it. Maybe that’s why he devoted himself to figuring out ways in which an actor could use their own self to build a character without feeling coy or egotistical.

Nonetheless, that complicated relationship with the audience dogged him. Using the mask of the fictional student Kostya, he writes: ‘I went out to the front of the stage and stared into the awful hole beyond the footlights, trying to become accustomed to it, and to free myself from its pull; but the more I tried not to notice the place the more I thought about it.’64 His perplexed relationship with the audience and his lack of confidence in his own skin manifested itself in chronic stage fright – and often he just couldn’t remember his lines.

He had always found learning lines difficult. He wasn’t one of those actors who could learn scripts parrot-fashion, and so he really benefitted from longer rehearsal periods. Yet as early as 1899, just one year after the creation of the Moscow Art Theatre, his co-founder and director Nemirovich-Danchenko grew so frustrated with Stanislavsky not knowing his lines as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, that he wondered what the point of disciplining the other actors was if the leading man set such a bad example! Stanislavsky’s trouble with line-learning continued for years, as he himself describes in 1915 when he was trying to memorise his role in Mozart and Salieri:

I acted the part all night, tormented by insomnia and the more I went through the lines the more I forgot them. During the day, in the street and in the carriage, I wore myself out with the same relentless, stupid repetition of the lines.⁶⁵

Fortunately and luckily, Stanislavsky was more than fine in his performance of Salieri and his stage fright actually motored him:

With my inner plan in pieces I decided, in actors’ jargon, to pull out all the stops, let fly physically and vocally. And did I not!! It was so easy but I knew that only sheer desperation could push me to such shameful lengths. The audience listened to me as never before. They even tried to applaud after the first scene. Moskvin rushed round during the interval and said that this was the only way to play it. I don’t understand a thing.66

By pulling out all the stops, and letting fly physically and vocally, Stanislavsky stepped out into the terrifying unforeseen.

Only two years later, though, Stanislavsky was truly crippled by stage fright as Rostanev in Nemirovich-Danchenko’s production of The Village of Stepanchikovo. He just couldn’t get what the director wanted. After 156 rehearsals, he was replaced at the dress rehearsal, and the experience shattered his confidence.⁶⁷ There were performances during his career in which Stanislavsky’s nerves were so stretched that he would constantly call for prompts and, even when he received them, still managed to fluff his lines. Theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout even goes so far as to say that Stanislavsky makes stage fright the precondition of theatrical success.⁶⁸ Whether or not that’s true, I’ve absolutely no doubt that if Stanislavsky hadn’t suffered such catastrophic performance anxiety, he would never have taken the time and deliberation to process and analyse acting. Thank goodness he could be such a wreck – because he went on create such a legacy.

While Stanislavsky might have believed that stage fright was an essential part of acting, his American successor, Lee Strasberg, felt exactly the opposite – possibly due to his own embarrassment at suffering from so much fear.

Lee Strasberg and stage fright

It’s not uncommon for interpreters of Lee Strasberg’s Method to fixate on his desire for ‘real emotion’ in actors’ performances. Some people argue that he was obsessed with emotional truth because he himself was emotionally very contained, and so his Method was geared towards emotional accessibility as a way of getting past his own restrictions as an actor. Whether or not this is really the case, I’d argue that – like Stanislavsky – Strasberg would never have spent so much time evolving the Method, if he’d been a confident actor from the get-go. His own frustrations with his instrument – possibly his own shyness, and even more possibly the fear he experienced if he couldn’t access what he wanted for a character – proved to be invaluable stimuli that we’ve all been able to benefit from as actors in theatre and film.

That said, Strasberg was far less sympathetic than Stanislavsky towards stage fright. As strict with himself as he was with his students, Strasberg dismissed stage fright as ‘the most vulgar preoccupation of them all.’69 (Interestingly enough, this quotation comes from his discussion of Stanislavsky’s issues with stage fright.) Yet Strasberg’s own fear of forgetting his lines is particularly powerful and revealing.

It happened to him during the filming of The Godfather Part III and the stakes were very high. Here he was, a world-renowned actor-trainer who hadn’t acted for quite some time, now invited by Al Pacino to make his movie debut. He knew the world would be watching him. And that pressure in itself was enough to prove that performance anxiety is not specific to live theatre. It can plague movie actors just as doggedly as theatre performers – even when we know we don’t have to sustain a performance for more than a few minutes. Even when we know that if we screw up, we can just go back and re-record. Nonetheless, Strasberg reveals something very telling in the following quotation, which gives us huge insights into why he spent years creating a Method. And curiously his motivation seems to be exactly the same as Stanislavsky’s:

What troubled me most was not any concern about my acting, but would I remember my lines? Would I hit the marks? This anxiety was something that I have always suffered from. When I was a young actor I had an excellent memory – I still do. I memorized lines very easily, and yet, whether in rehearsal or in performance, I would always go through attacks of anxiety. Before uttering the first line, I would repeat it again and again. Then, afraid I would forget it, I would whisper it over and over to myself until I entered the scene. Once I was there, my fear of forgetting disappeared. My concentration was always firmly on what I was doing. Yet for many actors this anxiety can often impede expressiveness.70

What a relief to know that both Stanislavsky and Strasberg suffered throughout their professional lives from the exactly same fears that haunt the rest of us! Along with Jacobi and Gambon, Olympia Dukakis, and Vivien Leigh (to name but a handful), we’re certainly in very good company and we needn’t be ashamed.

Overview

In this chapter, we’ve seen that stage fright is a natural response to an important event. We’ve undertaken three specific assessments. First, we’ve taken a bird’s-eye view of fear: we’ve looked at the physiological and psychological manifestations. We’ve looked at the evolutionary roots of stage fright and why it’s perfectly normal to be afraid of silent watchers in the dark. We’ve looked at some external factors and some internal factors. Second, we’ve assessed the nature of fear and met the Fear Family. Third, we’ve assessed the nature of ‘who we are’ in terms of our states of consciousness – as well as what happens when our consciousness fragments and we teeter on the edge of the abyss. Finally, we’ve looked at just how productive stage fright can be, inspiring two of the greatest acting gurus in contemporary history to come up with a ‘system’ (Stanislavsky) and a Method (Strasberg) to help us all get over it.

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Having put the actual phenomenon of stage fright under the microscope, let’s head out into the battlefield and meet the foe. Let’s see how – beyond the obvious fear engendered by a crowd of strangers in the dark – an audience became the enemy. How did it all begin? And how can the thought of stepping out in front of an audience make us want to run away from the profession that we love?