3. How Do You Remember All Those Lines?

‘Will I remember the lines?’

How is it that something as mundane as remembering our lines can become the most terrifying aspect of our craft? What about conjuring up the fictional realm? What about interpreting and embodying the role? Does it really all boil down to remembering the lines? All too often the answer is: ‘Yes.’ Ask many actors what the main manifestation of stage fright is and they’ll answer, ‘I’m afraid I’ll forget my lines.’ Which – configured slightly differently is – ‘I’m afraid I’ll let myself down.’ When it comes to memory, our Number-one Enemy is our self. And it can happen just as easily during a long run as it can on a first night. After years of performing the lead in The Phantom of the Opera, Michael Crawford started to doubt himself: ‘I’d played the Phantom for three and a half years, I must know the words by now.’102 Desperate to reassure ourselves, we repeat our lines over and over again. Just like the Oscar-winning actress Ruth Gordon, who would pace the wings ‘like a caged lioness, waiting for showtime, muttering to herself… every night of the run in the same methodical restlessness’.¹⁰³ Not that she was actually reviewing her lines: it was ‘a ritualistic attempt at self-comfort’.

What’s going on here? How can Michael Gambon’s fear of line-loss land him in hospital and put him on a drip? How can Derek Jacobi’s catatonic terror at forgetting ‘To be or not to be’ drive him off the stage for two years? How can great and experienced actors be so afflicted? Especially in an era when it wouldn’t be difficult (in fact, it’s quite common) for actors to have earpieces, into which their forgotten lines are whispered by an able ASM? Angela Lansbury flourished in Blithe Spirit on an earpiece – as allegedly have other actors including Matthew Broderick and Brian Dennehy. And we shouldn’t forget that writer-performer Alecky Blythe has revolutionised verbatim drama by having actors on visible earpieces – in effect, being deliberately prompted. So why are we so hard on ourselves? Why can the root of so much performance anxiety be traced to mere memory?

In this chapter, we’ll get to the very heart of it. We start by asking the basic question: What is memory? The meat of the chapter then breaks down into the three steps of the memory process: Step 1: How do we learn our lines? Step 2: How do we store lines in our head? And Step 3: How do we efficiently remember those lines when we need them? We then ask the key question: what’s happening when we forget our lines through stage fright? And we finish by asking the remedial question of: How can we handle it better by changing our thoughts and reconditioning our brain?

We already know that much of the time we don’t forget the lines because they’ve strangely faded away: we forget them because there’s some other interference. And, perverse as it may sound, that interference can be our worry about the memory loss itself. It’s back to the Fear Voice and those sabotaging imps that we encountered in Chapter 1. Robin Williams described it as the ‘hardcore nervousness’ of ‘It won’t work. It won’t work. I’ll forget the lines. Oh no!’¹⁰⁴ Derek Jacobi called it the ‘worm’ of self-doubt questioning, ‘Can I do this in front of all these people?’ The answer is: it will work and we can do it. We just have to diminish the demon’s thrall. Which means finding out more about the mechanics of memory to that we can face those fears head-on. So at each stage in this chapter, we look at what the brain is doing neurologically. And then we address some practical ways that we can help it work efficiently. But let’s start with the nitty-gritty: What is memory?

What is Memory?

‘How much memory does it have?’ We ask this all the time of our various technological devices. But what about the human device? How much memory do we have? Can we affect its size and efficiency? And what is it anyway? We’ve always been mystified by memory, considering it as much of a skill as any other, like speaking Spanish or juggling clubs. What’s more it’s a skill that can hugely impress our audiences. And therein lies the rub. ‘At every post-show discussion,’ notes actor Donald Carrier, ‘the audience asks the question, “How do you learn all those lines?”’105 So our ability to learn lines becomes almost synonymous with our talent as actors. ‘And it’s unfortunately taken on a kind of horrible pressure,’ says Carrier. ‘Actors who do have that skill – that gift – are very, very lucky. And other people just have to work very hard at it.’

There’s no denying that learning lines can be darn hard, and in many ways it’s getting harder. In everyday life, we’re becoming more and more reliant on our technological devices to store information for us. Phone numbers. Things-to-do lists. Directions to destinations. But learning lines is something we can’t depend upon our devices to do. We are our only resource. So to truly understand the process of memory, perhaps we need to return to a time before mobile devices existed. A time when human memory was considered ‘the mother of the Muses’ and an admirable gift of nature. Let’s travel back in time to ancient Greece…

The Greek philosopher Plato was among the first people to articulate the mechanics of memory – specifically so that he could help orators remember their speeches. A memory system, postulated Plato, was like a wax tablet, a tablet that could do three things: encode information, store that information, and retrieve that information when it was needed. Although we now know that our brain is way more complex than a wax tablet, the basic premise of Plato’s two-thousand-year-old postulation is still very relevant. As actors, we somehow need to encode the lines of our character; store those lines as long as the play runs or the film scene lasts; and retrieve them for every rehearsal, performance or take. Any difficulties we have in this three-stage process we call ‘forgetting’. Simple as that.

Yet if only it were that simple. One of the major challenges of remembering anything is that, at any one time, there’s a mass of information available to our brains, but only a small amount of that information is immediately accessible. (‘I know I know that actor’s name. Darn it – he was in that film called… you know.’) Herein lies the issue: how do we access a particular piece of information – like a line or a monologue – when we need it? After all, it’s not like retrieving data off our computers, where the storage system is static and we just click on whichever document we want, and the document is there and it’s the same every time we click on it. Our brain isn’t like that. The only way that our brain can access a memory is by creating it afresh every time. And that involves sending all sorts of signals to all the different neural regions and all at the same time. It’s a very dynamic process – even with a simple memory. For example, a hammer. I want you to remember a hammer. Can you picture it? Clearly and distinctly? Its handle, its head, its colour and its weight? Would it surprise you to know that even in that simple memory of a simple object an enormous amount of brainwork is taking place inside your head? Antonio Damasio sums it all up:

There is no single place of our brain where we will find an entry with the word hammer followed by a neat dictionary definition of what a hammer is. Instead, as current evidence suggests, there are a number of records in our brain that correspond to different aspects of our past interaction with hammers: their shape, the typical movement with which we use them, the hand shape and the hand motion required to manipulate the hammer, the result of the action, the word that designates it in whatever many languages we know. These records are… based on separate neural sites located in separate high-order cortices… Appreciating the shape of a hammer visually is different from appreciating its shape by touch; the pattern we use to move the hammer cannot be stored in the same cortex that stores the pattern of its movement as we see it; the [sounds] with which we make the word hammer cannot be stored in the same place, either.106

All that activity – just to remember a hammer? It’s extraordinary that a simple hammer can ignite so many different patterns and networks in our brain. It’s even more extraordinary that our brain can coordinate all these neuronal maps simultaneously so that they appear to us to be seamlessly integrated into what we picture as a hammer. So the answer to the question, ‘How much memory do we have?’ is: masses! In fact, the cognitive neuroscientist Michel Gazzaniga suggests that the only part of our lives that isn’t memory is ‘the thin edge of the present’¹⁰⁷ – that tiny moment of Now in which you and I exist. But how on earth does our brain do all this work? We need to study some basic neuroscience to deepen our understanding. Though we shouldn’t be daunted. This is just another battle tactic, before we stride indomitably like generals through the battleground. After all, the more we know about the processes of stage fright – and particularly the mechanics of memory – the more directly we can Face the Fear.

What’s the basic brain circuitry?

We’ll probably never really know how the brain works, as our understanding of it evolves all the time. And it’s not only our understanding that shifts. The brain itself is adapting as society and technology evolve. Even as I write – even as you read – there’ll be some laboratory somewhere making some new mind-blowing discovery. Our brain is one of the greatest mysteries in the world. Yet what we do know is that it’s one big energy powerhouse, generated by the tiny and miraculous nerve cells known as ‘neurons’. We’ve touched on neurons already, so now let’s probe a little deeper…

Neurons are probably the most valuable and extraordinary parts of our body. They’re also the most communicative. They’re constantly talking to each other by emitting and receiving electrochemical signals via the synapses (as we mentioned in Chapter 1). As we know, the gap between the end of a branch of one neuron and the branch of another neuron is called a ‘synaptic cleft’. So what happens is that the electrochemical signals leap across these clefts creating patterned pathways, which enable everything we think, do, feel, and experience. As I sit here writing, there are about 100 billion neurons in my brain, each with about a thousand synapses; that means maybe one quadrillion synaptic connections are happening right now. That’s an awful lot of activity over an awful lot of clefts. It’s enough to make my brain hurt!

As you can imagine, all this activity means that our neurons are very sensitive to any change around them. And, therefore, they’re very excitable. If they’re not actively firing, they wither and die. If they are actively firing, then they’re working unbelievably hard. Every second, they’re responding to all the outside-world stimuli bombarding our senses – such as colours and shapes, touches and tastes. At the same time, they’re responding to all the inner-world activities of our muscles, glands and organs. Here and now, I can hear the ticking of the clock at the same time as sensing that my heart is beating. In a simple moment of sedentary calm, there’s a lot of neuronal activity. So just imagine the numerous navigations that are happening when we suffer a surge of stage fright! Our poor neurons are responding to the rumble of the audience as they fill the auditorium, the chill of the draft in the backstage wings, the butterflies in our tummy, and the muttering of our lines, the palpitations, the self-doubt, the imaginings of imminent disaster as we humiliate ourselves in front of the masses. That’s a great deal of complicated communication between a great many complicated regions of our brain. However…

For our purpose of understanding stage fright even a tiny bit, we’re going to keep it simple. We’re not going to worry about all the complex regions of the brain. Here and now, we’re just going to get to know two of them: the seahorse-shaped hippocampus and the almond-shaped amygdala (which we’ve already briefly encountered). Both of them are highly influential in our brain’s evolution, and they’re both at the epicentre of our memory and fear. That makes them major protagonists in the drama of our stage fright. So like the superheroes they are, I’ve called them the Memory Master and the Vigilante. And they’re usually loyal warriors in our army. (Though – be warned – they’re sometimes inadvertently coopted into the enemy’s ranks. All the more reason to get to know them better.) As we look at how we learn lines – and what happens when we screw them up – these two characters will keep popping up in the drama.

First let’s go back to Plato’s wax tablet. We know this memory system comprises the three steps of encoding, storing and retrieving. So the first step in learning our lines is (obviously) encoding them.

Step 1: How Do We Encode a New Role?

Here’s where our neuronal superhero – the hippocampus, or the Memory Master – springs into action. Located near the centre of our brain, the hippocampus is vital when we’re encoding new information. And it’s especially impactful when we’re learning a new role. That’s because the hippocampus helps us to create new memories in two particular (very actor-friendly) ways: through our five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell) and through our perception of space.

Encoding through our senses

Once we understand that our hippocampus encodes through our five senses, we can start to consciously help it out. And there’s one very immediate and easy way that we can help it…

What’s the first thing we do when we’re cast in a role? We look at the script, of course! Sure, we’re reading to see what the piece is all about. But, if we’re honest, we’re also looking at how many lines we have. This is pragmatic, as much as egotistic. Our sensory perception of the script – the actual visuals of the lines on the page – will not only tell us how big (or important?) our role is, but also how much learning time we’ll need to carve out in our schedule. In fact, one of the most immediate ways in which we begin to learn a part is by its actual look on the paper. I’ve even heard actors say in rehearsal, ‘I can’t quite remember the line, but I know it’s at the bottom of the page.’

Whether or not they know their Memory Master hippocampus is at work here, many actors intuitively sense how important the look of the script is to their learning process. And they develop very personal feelings about it. Some don’t want a single mark or highlight or annotation. Others (myself included) cover their scripts with notes and colours and scribbles and doodles. Tanya Moodie describes how:

I separate the text with a pencil line into thought chunks, and sometimes even colour-code them with highlighters. I will circle first letters of words if there is a lot of alliteration, and mark out the antitheses. I try to make learning it a very active and muscular thing… so if I forget a word, I have a chance of remembering a colour or a feeling or an image or a rhythm. Sometimes if Shakespeare has used a complex antithetical image… I draw a picture of what I think that would look like next to the text.108

Moodie illustrates very clearly here that a strong sensory connection to the script can be very compelling in the learning process. And the sensory connection needn’t just be the look: it might be the feel of the paper or the smell of the binding. Each of us has a different relationship to the actual script, and in every case, it’s a sign that our hippocampus is helping us to encode the new material by appealing to our senses. So, we can do whatever we can to help it along the way.

Another way in which the hippocampus learns new information is by encoding through space. If we can learn more about what our brain is doing here, we can again understand how to assist in our own learning.

Encoding through space

I can remember almost every rehearsal room I’ve ever worked in. And I don’t just picture it – I can feel where I’m standing or sitting or moving in it. In fact, whenever we start to put a play on its feet, our hippocampus’s perception of space significantly leads our learning. This is a fact – a scientific fact that we know thanks to rats! By studying rodents, scientists have discovered that rats quickly learn the layout of a new maze as much by their orientation within the actual space as they do by any of their sensory perceptions (sight, smell, touch, etc.). In other words, it’s innate in us as mammals to learn through our physical bodies in space.

While the scientific proof of this fact may be recent, our intuitive knowledge of the learning power of space is ancient. For over two thousand years, the arts of memory and public speaking have been linked to space and architecture. (Which is not surprising, considering that we haven’t always had electronic devices to rely on.) In fact, it was the Greek poet Simonides, who first fathomed this around 500BC. He’d been giving a eulogy at a large banquet one day, when – shortly after he left – the roof of the hall collapsed, killing and mangling many of the diners. To help the authorities identify the bodies, Simonides pictured himself giving the eulogy in the banqueting hall and tried to remember exactly whom he saw sitting at each place around the table. He literally re-membered the dismembered bodies. As a result, he has been credited with what became known as the ‘loci method’ of recall. This highly imaginative way of encoding new information builds on the Memory Master hippocampus’s methods of learning through space and place.

Encoding through place: the ‘loci method’

‘Loci’ means places, and the loci method was used in line-learning for centuries, long before we knew anything about the hippocampus. What’s fascinating is that the loci method (intuitively) incorporates the way our hippocampus (biologically) helps us to encode new information through our awareness of what’s around us. The basic premise was that, if you were trying to learn a long speech or oration, the first thing you did was to picture an architectural structure – say, a house – either real or imaginary. You then wandered in your imagination through the house, placing an image of each thing you needed to remember in particular rooms in a particular order. So you might put ‘To be or not to be’ (the concept of existence) in the porch; ‘That is the question’ (the existential dilemma) in the hallway; and ‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind’ (the moral fortitude) in the sitting room, and so on. Then when it came to delivering your speech at a later date, you simply pictured yourself walking through your imaginary house and seeing each component of your speech in each room in the relevant order.

The loci method has had a massive impact across the centuries on how we learn – especially for actors. It was adopted and adapted by the Greek rhetorician Cicero (who suffered terrible stage fright, turning pale and quaking in his sandals whenever he had to give speech) and by the Latin orator Quintillius (who played a key role in developing early actor-training). Obviously the loci method was originally intended for orators, who would basically just be standing still and delivering a speech. So, taking an imaginary journey through a building while they were standing still could give them some specific pointers in their otherwise static state – and that helped them learn their lines.

We’re not orators – we’re actors. Most of our work naturally engages our whole body. And, indeed, the principle of linking memories to places is what rehearsing is all about. Be it stage or screen, our body and brain work together as we create a physical score within an actual space to encode the new material and help us learn the lines. We’ll look at this later when we address muscle memory and physical scores. Suffice it to say for the moment, that these key functions of the hippocampus – our senses and our perception of space, as well as the details of place (whether it’s real or imaginary) – are invaluable strategies for us when we’re in the first stages of encoding a new role.

That’s Step 1 of Plato’s wax-tablet memory system. Yet how do we ensure that we don’t just encode the lines, but that we store them efficiently? In other words, how do we transition effectively from Step 1 to Step 2? Again, we’re going to unpack the basic neuroscience, so that we can then be more conscious in our learning strategies.

Transition: How Do We Ensure that Encoding a New Role Leads to Storing that New Role?

There are all sorts of terms regarding memory, and not only can they be confusing but they’ve also been constantly changing over the last few decades. Here, as ever, we’re going to put it in simple layperson’s terms and see that Step 2 actually involves three stages: sensory memory; short-term memory; and long-term memory. We’ve encountered two of these stages in Chapter 1 when we looked at ‘choking’. The one stage we haven’t yet encountered is sensory memory – and this is where the memory process begins.

The basic stages of encoding and storing new memories

At every waking moment, our senses are being bombarded with information: the sound of a passing car, the smell of hot tar, the taste of the coffee as we silently sip. For barely a second, our brain holds onto this information – this sensory memory – while it decides whether we need to do anything with it or if we can just let it go.¹⁰⁹ We simply don’t have the head-space (or the time) to make every piece of sensory information relevant. If we attended to every noise, smell, or sip, we’d never get anything done! So most sensory memory stays on the peripheries of our consciousness. That cheeping bird… My husband’s aftershave… The computer keyboard beneath my fingers… Drifting in… drifting out…

If, however, we want to remember something (such as the lines of our script), we have make sure that the information shifts from our fleeting sensory memory into something more conscious.¹¹⁰ In other words, we can’t just flip through a script and trust that the words will magically lodge in our heads. We have to invest some effort into bringing those words from the peripheries of our awareness to the centre. And that requires several stages of memory, starting with our short-term memory.

For short-term memories to be created, we actively have to register, recognise, or recall the particular information involved, be they ‘numbers, words or statements, and they need to be recalled after a specific delay, usually five to ten minutes’.111 In and of itself, our short-term memory can be pretty short. Indeed, it may last little more than a few minutes – maybe long enough to remember a phone number just before we dial it or a couple of last-minute script changes just before we shoot – and maybe up to a few hours.

Yet despite its comparative brevity, short-term memory is the first vital step in creating more durable, longer-term memories. In fact, it’s short-term memory that we’re using when we first need to recall the script, understand the blocking and the body movements, and remember all that information.¹¹² It would be almost impossible for us to create a long-term memory unless that information had passed through the conscious realm of our short-term memory first.

So how do we make sure that we set the whole storage process in motion? How do we convert a very fleeting sense memory into a slightly more enduring short-term memory into a rock-solid long-term memory? The answer is actually very simple: We give it some attention.

Pay attention!

Attention is crucial for us when it comes to encoding and storing our lines. (In acting terminology, we also know it as ‘focus’, ‘concentration’ and ‘concentration of attention’, and it’s one of the four pillars on which Stanislavsky built his ‘system’ along with Relaxation, Observation and Imagination.) Attention is the fundamental tool we use to let our brain know that something is worth learning, and we do it through a series of split-second choices. Here’s an example…

Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re in a rehearsal room and we’re working on a new play. During the tea break, the playwright comes over to us and flashes a piece of paper at us. On it, there’s a rewrite. First of all, our attention goes to the playwright and then pretty quickly turns to this vital, new piece of sensory information: the paper in his hand. Instantaneously, our brain sifts through all the other reference points coming to us at that moment in our fleeting sensory memory. (Maybe our stage manager is laughing in the corridor. A fellow actor is handing us a cup of hot coffee. Our phone is vibrating in our pocket as our agent calls us.) Immediately, our brain evaluates what we’re up to in our present-tense activity and, from that instant evaluation, it determines what’s most important for us to attend to consciously here and now. So at this moment in the rehearsal-room, the rewrite should probably get our full attention. (Our stage manager’s joke, the cup of coffee, even our agent can wait.) If, however, we spill the scalding coffee – or the vibration of our phone becomes so insistent that it must be Hollywood calling – or our stage manager’s hearty laugh turns into hysterical sobbing – then our full attention will switch from the rewrite to whatever else has now taken precedence. And thus a new short-term memory will be forged.

In many ways, we know the brain needs us to pay attention in the first stages of learning – because we know how hard it is to learn something if our attention isn’t fully on it. Have you ever started learning your lines for a new role while you’re driving the car, changing the baby’s nappy, cooking the dinner? It’s nigh on impossible. When we first try to encode our lines, it’s much, much harder if we’re multitasking. Once we’ve encoded them, then sure – we can knit, do yoga, jig, jog or juggle. But at the very first encounter, we need our full attention to pass from encoding new memories to storing those memories. We need to shift a stimulus from our peripheral (and largely unconscious) sensory memory to our more focused (and conscious) short-term memory. And the next stage in ensuring that we store something as important as our lines is to make sure that they then pass absolutely from our transient short-term memory to our durable long-term memory. Let’s once more understand what’s happening neurologically before putting practical strategies in place to help our brain with that process.

Step 2: How Do We Store Our Lines in Our Long-term Memory?

Lots of transitory, moment-by-moment activity goes on in our brain during sensory memory and short-term memory. However, when it comes to committing information to our long-term memory, our brain actually changes shape. If you were a London cabbie, you’d know this anyway – because you’d have taken the ‘All-London Knowledge’. For the All-London Knowledge, ‘Would-be taxi drivers have to learn 320 routes within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, which covers a mind-boggling 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest.’113 A study by the University of London compared similar brain scans from taxi drivers and non-taxi drivers, and discovered that each person who had attempted the Knowledge had notably increased the size of their posterior hippocampus. Yes, indeed – they’d made their brains bigger through gaining long-term memories. That’s quite a feat! I wonder what the results would be on actors such as Ralph Fiennes or Judi Dench – or all those actors with a canon of Shakespeare tucked inside their own posterior hippocampi? But how can creating long-term memories actually change our brains? Again, we’ll keep it simple and laypersonable…

What happens when we interact with something in the outside world (e.g. an object such as our script, a person such as another actor, or a place such as a film location) is that our brain turns that outside stimulus into an inner representation. It’s also known as a ‘map’ inside our heads. It does this by means of all that electrochemical communication that goes on between our neurons, and it uses proteins to actually change them. Some neurons become more active, some neurons become inactive. And the result of all this neuronal protein-chatting is that new connections are made in our brain to create the new inner map. And this new inner map is actually a new long-term memory. So you see, storing memories involves actively changing our brain. (Which is why stress can be so bad for us, as we touched on in Chapter 1. When we’re under stress, we keep repeating negative thoughts; and those repetitions activate the changes that then lodge that negativity in our long-term memory.)

As we saw with Damasio’s hammer, the process of remembering is incredibly complex. We know that our brain isn’t like a computer where we can just press the iMovie icon. Nor do we have a screen located in one specific part of our brain onto which is projected the image of a hammer banging a nail into wood. Nor is the representation of the hammer in our heads one fixed map, like the map of the London Underground. As Damasio pointed out, how we perceive the hammer creates one particular map in one location. How we feel about the hammer creates another particular map in another location. And in a nanosecond all these diverse maps follow on one after another and relate to each other in astonishingly coherent ensembles.¹¹⁴ These coherent ensembles are what we end up experiencing as the memory of a hammer. It’s amazing!

It’s even more amazing when it comes to building a fictional character. In making a long-term memory of a role, we’re not just seeing the image of the text on the page (though, as we know, that does have some impact). Our actual experience of the black-and-white text includes maps of the research we’ve done, maps of our emotional lures into the role, maps of our rehearsed staging, maps of our fellow actors’ faces and gestures, maps of the props we pick up, and maps of all the images provoked by the writer’s language. All these multiple maps (created in multiple places in our brain) synchronise in a deeply mysterious way to give us our interpretation of Hamlet or Blanche Dubois or Superman or GI Jane.

The way in which our brain actually changes shape through these myriad maps – in order to lock in and store our long-term memories of a role – is literally mind-boggling! And it costs our brain quite some energy. That’s why we really have to give the lines of the script some valuable attention. Otherwise, our brain doesn’t know that it should bother with the effort of changing all those proteins in the first place. Long-term memory mapping only occurs for us when (in the words of biophysicist Stefan Klein) our brain is ‘certain that the outcome warrants it. Only when the stimuli that are to be linked in the memory have appeared together often enough do new bridges grow in the brain – the reason that remembering takes repetition and practice.’115

What this all means – if we unpack it carefully – is that we actually have quite a bit of power here. As long as our brain is fit and healthy, we can consciously adopt strategies that make us more efficient, long-term learners.

So that’s the neuroscience. What are the practical strategies?

Practical strategies for enhancing our long-term storage of memories

Learning lines is a vital part of our skill-set as actors. We can’t avoid it. So it’s great to realise how much control we have in strengthening that skill. In fact, there are three practical, manageable strategies that we can apply to help our brain convert our short-term memories into storable, durable, long-term memories. Those strategies are repetition, meaning, and (curiously) downtime.

Repetition

Be it television, film or the kind of Shakespeare summer festivals that proliferate in North America, we often have very short rehearsal periods and we may be preparing two or three projects at a time. So we have to do a lot of line-learning before filming takes place or rehearsals begin. Usually that line-learning can only be achieved through repetition. Unless we’re a regular in a TV soap and we’re in the habit of learning lines moments before shooting, most of us simply have to put in the ‘grunt work’.116 And how we go about that grunt work can vary hugely. Some of us drill the lines by going over and over them out loud or in our heads – maybe just before we go to sleep so that we can lull them into our subconscious. Some of us write them out a hundred times, like doing lines in school detention. Some of us move around the room, picturing where we might be on the set. Some of us repeat our lines while we’re doing something deliberately unrelated: pruning the roses or washing the dishes. Some of us record our lines on our iPhones and listen to them again and again while driving or ironing or jogging. Some of us record the other characters’ lines and speak out loud when it comes to our cues. Some of us hire a helpmate (or recruit a husband) to go through our scenes to the point of saturation (or divorce…).

The important thing to remember is that the line-learning is not rote-learning. Certainly one of the reasons for the constant repetitions is to store the lines in our long-term memory, but more importantly, the repetitions can be a direct route into the character’s inner life. Actor Jay Whittaker describes:

I’ll sit on my sofa and I’ll probably say a phrase twenty-five times in my head until it’s stuck and then I’ll move on to the next piece of the line. As the lines start to connect and actually make more sense, then they’re not just repetition because images start to come. Then the ideas – the emotions behind the images – start to emerge. And I just keep repeating the phrases over and over. And as it starts to become emotional, the character starts to come out.117

And so it goes – from repetition to sense to image to emotion to character. When we’re up against the clock of limited rehearsal, we have little choice but repeatedly to give our full attention to the actual physical script. It’s the only way to convince our brains that the information is worth investing all that electrochemical and protein-changing effort. And nothing but that protein-changing effort will fix a map of those lines in our long-term memory. I repeat: we’re not talking about mindless rote-learning here. As Whittaker points out, the repetition process allows the whole character to emerge. And that’s partly because our imagination starts to give the lines meaning.

Meaning

It may sound obvious, but mindless rote-learning never works in the long run anyway. ‘The mere repetition of information, with no additional thought about meaning or associations,’ writes cognitive scientist Jonathan Foster, ‘can help us to retain information for a few seconds, but it is generally a very poor method of learning for the longer term.’¹¹⁸ I doubt many actors do the kind of cramming for a play that we did as teenagers swatting up on the English kings for our GCSE History. (‘Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste, Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three…’) That said, sometimes we simply have to. Sometimes we’ve only been given a few hours to get a TV audition onto tape – added to which, we’ve only been sent the sides for our part. So we have absolutely no idea what the lines might mean in the bigger context of the whole script and we have little choice but to fall back on line-bashing.

Trying to keep that information in our memory for a matter of hours is what neuroscientists Craik and Watkins call ‘maintenance rehearsal’.¹¹⁹ And I confess, I used to fall back on maintenance rehearsal all the time at drama school. I was so saturated by the constant stream of new material to be learned – monologues, dialogues, scenes, sonnets, soliloquies, dialects, songs – that sometimes I found myself doing last-minute cramming in a desperate attempt to maintain my memory for just a matter of hours. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t – because, as Craik and Watkins also point out, if we want a deeper, more persistent memory, we need more ‘elaborate rehearsal’.120

Elaborating on the text really just means giving it meaning. And it’s one of the best ways of storing our lines for more than a few hours and ensuring that we’re more likely to retrieve them when we need them. Added to which, it’s something that we can consciously do. When we give a script meaning, we grant it some personal value for us as empathic human beings. We stimulate our imaginations with questions like: ‘What do the character’s words mean to me personally? Which aspects of my own temperament and history connect to these lines? What’s the context of the material (i.e. what’s the situation in which the characters find themselves)? What’s the function of the material (i.e. what do they want out of this situation? And why did the writer script this scene in the first place?)’ Suddenly there’s a whole heap of images and ideas that help us to give the lines meaning and to elaborate on their context. And then of course they’re easier to store. Here’s another vivid description from Tanya Moodie, in which she illustrates how giving meaning to the lines can involve all kinds of imaginative hypotheses, as well as possible objectives and actions for the character:

I associate the line-learning with understanding my character’s objective. So firstly, after a readthrough of the script (or maybe two or three readings), I sit, pencil in hand, and begin to write down a few hypotheses of what might be driving the character, based on love or power, and try to encapsulate my ideas into one or two pithy sentences that describe their greatest desire (Overall Objective).

Then, I start reading through from the beginning again, scene by scene… and I separate each unit with a pencil line. The units are when I change tack in my efforts to achieve my overall objective. I give each scene its own objective that feeds like a tributary into my character’s overall objective, and I give each line an action that spurs forward my objective. I write all these things in and around the text of the script. I will also write down any snippets of inner monologue that I might be thinking while processing what another character has said to me. Then I will start speaking the text aloud while trying to express the action of each line in the manner in which I speak it. In this way, I am not only committing a text to memory, but I am also embodying a fundamental need to succeed in achieving my desires. The words and the character’s rhythms come more naturally then. I do this unit by unit, so that all the chunks have clear psychological progression.121

We can sense the energy and impulse-to-action behind Moodie’s descriptions. The work is elaborate, it’s imaginative, and it’s meaningful. (We’ll look at the power of text analysis in greater detail in Chapter 5.)

While of course we need to give a text personal meaning, it’s also very useful to research more broadly around the subject, and there are several avenues for this. First, there’s the research we do by means of the third pillar of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’: Observation. (The other three pillars are Relaxation, Attention, and Imagination, and they’ll crop up again.) This kind of research involves the nitty-gritty of real life, and Antony Sher describes it as ‘a wake-up call’:

Drama can be a kind of dream, a kind of sleep, where we imitate art rather than life, believe in fiction’s received ideas, fall for Hollywood’s view of the world. Look at the street brawl: it’s messy, the blows mostly miss, those that land really hurt or stun; it’s nothing like what some fight directors encourage actors to do, delivering and receiving blows with absurd grace – stylised, macho and pain-free – an insult to the victims of real violence. Look at real grief, too, or real drunkenness – it’s not what you generally see on stage. We actors frequently copy previous interpretations of human behaviour rather than the real thing. Research takes you back to the truth.122

Linked to the research drawn from real-life observation, there’s the research that comes from the fourth pillar of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’: Imagination. This avenue of research is steeped in the facts surrounding the play – its historical, political, social or aesthetic context. Once we’ve collated the facts, then we can start to riff on them imaginatively. Through this kind of research, we give ourselves even more ‘elaborate rehearsal’ and that can really help us to lock in the lines. After all, there’s ‘a complex mutually reinforcing relationship between attention, interest, motivation, expertise and memory,’ writes Foster, ‘so that the more knowledgeable you become in a particular field, the more interest you will have in it – and your knowledge and interest will reinforce each other in improving your memory for material.’¹²³ So when Miles Anderson was learning the huge role of Salieri in Amadeus (as mentioned in the Preface), he started listening to and learning about the music described in the play. And before long, he had an emotional understanding of the musical references, as well as an ‘interest’ and ‘expertise’ in what the character was talking about. This elaborate, personal connection to the material gave it even greater meaning and helped Anderson consolidate his memory of the lines. It also consolidated the critical acclaim that he went on to receive in the role.

As if one large role wasn’t enough, Anderson was also playing Prospero in The Tempest during the same season. Learning such a vast number of lines is a monumental task, and it really can exhaust the grey matter. Understandably, Anderson found that his brain couldn’t keep on learning for hours on end: sometimes it just needed some downtime.

Downtime

We can actually strengthen our long-term memory by allowing ourselves some downtime: this is a scientifically proven fact – as well as being a great comfort. During the gaps between rehearsals, our brain is doing a huge amount of learning by itself. All too often when we have a mountain of lines ahead of us, we end up thinking that we have to line-bash intensively for hours at a time. (After all, knowing our lines is the least the director will expect of us, so we’d bloody well better learn them as quickly as we can.) Yet studies have shown that this kind of approach is misguided. Our brain works far more effectively if we take time off between our learning bouts. So we’re allowed to have that cup of tea. We’re allowed to have that game of online poker. In fact, we’re not only allowed to, we should – because we’re making our brains more effective. How wonderful!

It’s what’s Craik and Watkins call ‘expanding rehearsal’ or ‘spaced retrieval’.124 And we can be far more effective in learning our lines if we come back to them after short breaks. (So go and swim twenty lengths – or make a fish pie.) To be even more efficient, we should increase the length of the downtime every time we take a break. (So go and swim fifty lengths – or make a fish pie and a lemon tart.) And yet I know from my own experience that sometimes taking breaks can feel counter-intuitive. Especially if we don’t have much time to learn a script. We whip ourselves into a frenzy of thinking, ‘I’ve got to spend every waking moment learning these lines!’ Yet it may surprise you to know that one of the best ways of strengthening our synaptic connections – and shifting those lines from our short-term memory to our long-term memory – is not only to take a break, but to leave the space between our retrievals to the point at which we’ve almost forgotten them!

This is remarkably reassuring. How often have we spent hours learning a script, then put it down till the next day only to find that, when we do come back to it, we can barely remember a word? There’s no need to panic. This is actually a good thing. We should accept that we’re using our brain very efficiently. We’ve spaced the retrieval of our lines to the point where we’ve almost forgotten them. So now we’ve given our neurons time between learning sessions to change those proteins, build those new synapses, and create a long-term, inner map of our role. Our brain can’t do all that work if we don’t give it time and keep bombarding it with line-bashing. If, instead, we allow some spaced retrieval, then the next time we come back to the script, our recall of the lines will be easier… and the next time easier… and easier… and so on. In fact, ‘two spaced presentations of material to be learned are often twice as effective as two concentrated, unspaced presentations.’125 (So head to the sea and swim the Channel – or cook a five-course dinner!)

It’s important to understand this process of consolidated learning. And to understand that our time-out is improving our line-learning, not breaking our flow. Then we can adopt the right practices to make sure that our fragile memory of a new script grows stronger and stronger and stronger. At the same time, we can silence the panicky, self-sabotaging Fear Voice of, ‘You’re not working hard enough! You don’t know the lines yet!’ – Those interfering, totally unhelpful doubt-worms have no justification in trying to work us to a frazzle. When we allow a time of ‘expanding rehearsal’, we give our proteins time to synthesise. This in turn enables the new information that we’ve encoded to become stored as new long-term memories. And those long-term memories can last for weeks and months and even years. What kinder thing can we do to our brain, than take a break and have a cup of tea?

*

These are three manageable and practicable strategies that we easily implement to enhance our long-term storage: repeating the lines; giving them meaning; and taking some downtime. It’s also worth reminding ourselves at this point of the power of our body in the learning process. After all, we know that we also retain memories through our perception of space and place. It’s what’s commonly known as muscle memory and it’s another simple strategy that we can adopt to convert encoded information into stored memories.

Muscle memory

‘Excuse me, please. Could you direct me to Oxford Street?’
– ‘Well, no actually, I can’t: but I can take you there.’

‘Excuse me, please. Could you tell me how to change a
plug?’ – ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t: but I can show you how.’

It’s strange how our body seems to hold its own memory of space and instructions, even if our conscious mind doesn’t know the exact words or logic. Biologically, of course, our muscles can’t actually hold memory: it’s our brain that does that. Yet certainly one of the most useful ways of remembering our lines is ‘getting them into our body’. In many ways, we use muscle memory all the time: ‘Now where did I put my keys? I came into the house. I dropped off the milk. I picked up the cat…’ And we sometimes literally walk through the room trying to re-enact what we did, so that we can prompt ourselves into remembering where we actually put the keys. When it comes to acting, we know that part of the point of rehearsing is to build a physical score and imbue ourselves with some muscle memory. (‘This is where I say the line about Moscow. Then, I go over to the chaise and ask Vershinin about his wife…’) If we can associate lines with where we are in the space and what our body is doing on particular words, then it’s much easier to recall them later – because the movement of our body and the actual space provide their own prompts. (It’s worth pointing out that half the time we do this work intuitively. In which case, there’s no need to think about it consciously. Don’t forget, all these are strategies are really here to help us if we’re suffering from stage fright. If we’re not, we can just get on with our usual process, whatever that might be.)

Personally, I do very little line-learning sitting down: I do most of it on my feet in a space, even if it’s not the actual theatre or set. Obviously when we’re working on detailed text analysis, we can’t avoid a certain amount of sitting and imagining. Yet, throughout this book, we see that bedding in the lines for the long term can be so much easier when our body does as much work as our brain.

*

Let’s recap: we’ve looked at the ways in which we encode a new role (through our senses, our spatial perception, and the details of place). We’ve negotiated the ways in which encoding a new role leads to storing a new role (through our fleeting sensory memory, our slightly more enduring short-term memory and our durable long-term memory). And we’ve looked at some practical ways of strengthening our ability to store our lines in our long-term memory (using repetition, meaning, downtime and muscle memory). We should now be in a strong position to tackle Step 3 in Plato’s wax-tablet memory system – retrieving our lines when we need them. Here again, the Memory Master – the hippocampus – springs into action. Back to a bit of neuroscience, before we add the practical strategies…

Step 3: How Do We Retrieve Our Lines?

Have you ever noticed that when we first start to remember any new information, we’re only too conscious of the fact that we’re remembering it? It happens all the time in rehearsals when we first come ‘off-book’ – and there’s almost always a bit of a setback. We let go of the security blanket of the paper-and-glue script – and suddenly we’re very aware that we’re bashing our heads to remember our lines and we just can’t get into the flow of the scene. That’s because we’re still in the short-term (working) stage of locking in the memories. So we’re still very conscious that we’re remembering to remember.

In the rehearsal room, this can be particularly frustrating, as we have to keep calling for ‘Line!’ It breaks our creative flow and it drags us out of the scene. And it feels like interference at every possible level. We’ve already seen that any glitches in our memory are usually due to some kind of interfering thought that pops into our head. At this stage in rehearsals, that interfering thought is ‘I don’t know these lines yet’. And that voice of uncertainty can be louder in our head than the actual lines of the script. Any experienced director will know that there’s a time in rehearsals where he or she becomes a bit redundant. The actors are still in this phase of short-term memory – struggling through their half-learned lines as their brains forge the necessary, new, synaptic connections. And – yes – it is frustrating, but most of us know it’s just a natural and transitory part of the learning process.

And, sure enough – once we’ve got over these the first Bambi-frail staggerings through the script – we begin to find that we don’t have to consciously remember the lines any more. They’re starting to lodge in our long-term memory. And this is when the true creative fun begins to happen and we really start to listen and play. That’s because we’re becoming ‘habituated’ to the scene. In fact, habituation (as it’s known in psychology) is a great state to be in when it comes to remembering our lines.

Habituation

Habituation basically involves us becoming so used to a situation or an activity that it doesn’t distract us.126 This state is incredibly useful for us as actors – especially in the theatre. We want to become so habituated to our lines that we can almost forget we know them and just ‘find’ them in the moment of performance. In other words, we want to lodge them in our long-term memory (where we don’t have to think about them any more) rather than in our short-term memory (where we’re conscious that we’re remembering them). When we’re totally at ease with the habit of being on stage, there’s no interference in our head any more. There’s no ‘What do I say next?’ Instead, there’s a kind of sublime alignment between our self as an actor and the ‘life’ of the character.

Part of my own process of facing and conquering stage fright involved understanding the creative joys of habituation. It was the Spring of 2015 and I was preparing a fact-based, one-person piece for the Hollywood Fringe Festival: Nell Gwynne: A Dramatick Essaye on Acting and Prostitution. Fairly early on in the process, I became aware that I was in danger of flirting with the imps of stage fright. It had been nearly ten months since I’d done any live acting (through circumstance rather than choice) and I knew that Nell would be my launch into the LA acting scene.

The whole process was fairly compacted. Between February and May, I researched and wrote the piece. Then I had just nine evenings of rehearsal over two weeks before the first preview. So it didn’t take much for the worm of self-doubt to begin nibbling on my grey matter. I knew that the number-one solution to keep those doubts at bay was to do whatever I could to reach a state of habituation as quickly as I could. So, this is what I did practically to recruit my neurological processes: I simply went over and over and over the material as often as I could. In my head… in my body… at fast speed… at slow speed… on a mocked-up set… walking into work… wherever, whenever, however was possible. It was a discipline, a practice – just as people might practice their Buddhist chants. And I had one driving goal in mind: to habituate myself to the lines and the moves, to the point at which I could sustain one of two desired states in performance:

• Performance State 1: I would be totally confident in my autopilot knowledge of the play. Then, if the imps did start their sabotaging chatter mid-performance, I could easily deal with the situation by just allowing my body and mouth to go through the motions until I’d shut the imps up.

• Performance State 2: I would be totally at ease with the material: the moves, actions, desires, lines, objectives, emotional trajectory, direct address to the audience, all of it. That way, I could ‘forget’ I knew the words and simply play with them in the moment of delivery.

Obviously the second state was far more desirable than the first. The first would mean that I was not having a good time on stage and that I was battling with the interfering demon of stage fright and his minions, the imps. The second would mean that I was having such a great time on stage that I’d forgotten to let the imps in, let alone listen to them: and, thus, I’d defeated the demon!

These were the two ‘ideal’ Performance States. (The third – Total Public Meltdown – was unthinkable.) And I knew that these states would only be achievable if I could totally habituate myself to the play and its contents.

I cannot tell you how many times I went through those lines and moved through those stage pictures. I cannot tell you just how precisely I laid out the props and costumes at each rehearsal and performance. I knew exactly where I’d like them to be, so that they could literally and metaphorically guide me through the physical score if the imps started chattering. (That said, I wasn’t so wholly fixated on it that, should a prop be moved or not even be there, I’d fall to bits. I was simply finding some conscious strategies to help the unconscious do its thing.) I was determined that nothing was going to stop me from successfully retrieving my lines – not monsters, nor demons, nor imps, nor worms!

Sure enough, by the end of the month-long festival – mission accomplished. Demon defeated! For this solo production, where I had no partner to bail me out, I knew that habituation was the best strategy for retrieving my lines and facing my stage fright. Sure, the props screwed me up sometimes and the costumes misbehaved. (There’s no such thing as a ‘solo’ show – it’s just that your partners are supposedly inanimate. The imps will find their way in somehow.) I even reached the point that, when I did forget the lines in performance (as I did several times, though I don’t think anyone knew), I was so at ease, I could breathe into the moment in the knowledge that the stage felt like home and the audience was with me. Although we received various awards and nominations – including two for Best Female Performer – the highest accolade came from another actor with a one-person play. He came up to me after a performance and said, ‘Oh, my God, you’re so relaxed on stage. It’s so sexy!’ Mission definitely accomplished. Where habituation reigns, there’s little space for stage fright.

Having said all that, it can be quite different for screen acting. Some actors find that there’s a real benefit to not knowing the lines too well, and they enjoy the edginess of finding them on the brink of a breath. In fact, Marlon Brando was renowned for not learning his words. In a perverse ‘anti-stage fright’, he was apparently more afraid of knowing his lines than he was about forgetting them. If he knew them too well, his acting might be phoney; whereas if he didn’t know them at all, he could really live in the moment. So he used to stick cue cards all over the set. He even stuck them on his fellow actors’ bodies, as you can see in the famous photograph of Robert Duvall with a cue card held to his torso during the filming of The Godfather.127 Allegedly, Brando’s reasoning was, ‘The audience doesn’t know what I’m about to say, so why should I?’ I doubt many of us could get away with that kind of genius or mischief or whatever you want to call it. (Indeed, as we’ll see in Chapter 5, some screen actors have morphed Brando’s chutzpah into a certain ‘cool’ of improvising their lines, regardless.) Nonetheless, there’s still the safety net with filmed work that if we do forget our lines, we can record another take. Which is why so many actors who suffer fright on the stage find solace on the screen – as did Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon and Ian Holm.

One of the great things about habituation is that it’s a practical strategy we can achieve on our own through rehearsal and repetition. We’ve also got other practical strategies for retrieving our lines that don’t rely so heavily on ourselves. One such example is to use the theatre architecture to give us points of reference.

Retrieving information through the theatre architecture

The basic premise of rehearsing (as we’ve already seen) is to map onto the stage set where the best moves would be to tell the story most compellingly. At the same time, we’re giving ourselves some physical pointers – some muscle memories – to help us (consciously or unconsciously) to retrieve the lines each time. But we’re not just restricted to the set. We can also use the entire theatre architecture as a prompt to our memory retrieval, if we think it’s going to be useful. The specifics of how we map our moves may be really quite minimal. For example, with the many direct-address speeches that I had in The Permanent Way – where I was doing little more than sitting in a chair – I constructed a micro-score based on the theatre space itself to help me remember the text: ‘On this line I look towards the emergency sign at the back of the circle. On that line I cross my right leg towards the left side of the stalls.’ Little did I know that I was actually drawing upon a memory system that went right back to the early Renaissance. Since it’s such a simple way of anchoring our memory (should we need to), let’s do a little more time-travel to see where it all started…

It’s 1530 and we’re in the court of the French king. But more importantly we’re in the company of one of the most famous men of his time: the Italian thinker Giulio Camillo. Camillo was actually the first person to make an explicit connection between memory and theatre architecture. He designed what he called his wooden ‘Theatre of Memory’, and his magic number was seven. In his memory theatre, there were seven steps divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. On each of the seven gangways were seven gates decorated with cosmological and mythological imagery. And although Camillo’s memory theatre wasn’t intended for actual plays, the idea was that if you stood on the stage and looked out towards the auditorium, you could use the physical structure of the theatre to prompt you into remembering specific information.128

And this architectural practice didn’t stop with Camillo. If you’ve ever seen the famous copy of Johannes de Witt’s 1596 sketch of the Swan Theatre in London, then you’ll have seen an allusion to the next evolution of Camillo’s memory theatre. It was equally significant, and this time it was conjured up by the Elizabethan physician Robert Fludd.¹²⁹ Just like Camillo, Fludd created a direct relationship between the art of memory and the architecture of a theatre. He drew various theatre drawings (not dissimilar to de Witt’s sketch), which depict his memory stages. This time the lucky number was five. In his memory stages, there were five entrances, five columns (two round, two square and one hexagonal), and five doors (white, red, green, blue and black).

This knowledge is all very intriguing, given all the discussion among theatre historians linking Fludd’s memory stages to Shakespeare’s Globe. What it basically suggests is that, at the very root of modern theatre architecture – including Shakespeare’s theatre itself – lay a way of helping us as actors to remember our lines. You could say these architects were directly tackling stage fright! Whether they knew it or not, Camillo and Fludd were both tapping into our hippocampus’s way of using the body in space and our physical context to help us retrieve our lines. Now that’s pretty exciting – and we can still employ it today should we find that we’re in need of a little aid to memory.

*

Thus we have two more practical strategies that we can use to strengthen our long-term memory: habituation (repetition to the point where we no longer have to explicitly think about what we’re doing) and using the theatre architecture to prompt our memories (just as our Renaissance ancestors did – and possibly Shakespeare himself!).

We’ve now looked at the three-step memory process of successfully encoding, storing and retrieving our lines. And in so doing we’ve learnt from both our theatrical ancestors and our contemporary neuroscientists. But of course it’s the unsuccessful memory that can bring on our stage fright. So what’s happening when we forget? And how can we forearm ourselves against such an eventuality?

What Happens When Our Memory Fails Us?

‘How do you remember all those lines?’ We know this is what audiences awe over. We also know it’s the nub of our work as actors. Yet sometimes we don’t remember them. Sometimes we suddenly forget them. And that unintended rupture in our fundamental craftsmanship can explode into an experience of stage fright. As we’ve already noted, the problem usually begins with a glitch in the retrieval part of our memory process. We’ve encoded the lines; we’ve stored the lines; but somehow our retrieval screws up. And the protagonist now in the drama of our stage fright is the other neurological superhero: the amygdala, the Vigilante. We encountered the amygdala in Chapter 1 when we looked at the evolutionary provokers of stage fright. So now let’s look more closely at what it’s up to when we forget our lines. We may not be able to stop the Vigilante, but at least we’ll understand what it’s doing.

When the amygdala – the Vigilante – becomes over-attentive

As we know, the amygdala is a tiny security system lodged in our heads as a kind of ‘mind within a mind’. It’s vigilant. It can be twitchy. It receives its data raw. So when we encounter a new situation (like a film location or an audition room – or worse, a sudden memory lapse when we’re standing on the stage), the amygdala kicks into gear within milliseconds – far faster than our conscious mind. It scans our past experiences to see if it finds any matches with any previous life-threatening situations. And if it finds a close enough match with a past threat, it fires up our fear reaction of fight, flight or freeze.130

The amygdala’s vigilance can be both a help and a hindrance. On the help side, it can save our lives if we’re in real danger. On the hindrance side, it’s not very precise and it sometimes gets things wrong. So, we forget our lines in the middle of a scene and – ‘Attention! Scan the past! When were we last standing in the dark with a hot, blinding light shining in our eyes and faceless strangers waiting for us to say something?’ (Sounds more like a Gestapo interrogation than a momentary glitch in a performance.) The trouble is that, even when it gets things wrong, the fear system is a very persistent memory system – because it wants to be sure it’s doing its job. After all, if it misjudges a situation and it doesn’t read the dangers, it could literally be a matter of life and death. And so the amygdala ‘forms opinions’ about what we should or shouldn’t fear, and ‘those opinions are very tough to change’.¹³¹

They’re tough to change partly because, when we’re experiencing moments of intense fear, the amygdala etches very detailed information into our brain. So much detail, in fact, that it can feel as if the event is happening in slow motion. That’s certainly what I felt during my stage-fright experience in The Permanent Way. Everything went into slo-mo. I couldn’t tell what speed the words were coming out of my mouth. I felt as if I was walking on the moon. And the detail and the robustness of the memory – as implanted by my amygdala – were very damaging. I couldn’t shift the fear. For a long time afterwards, the stage space felt threatening and uncomfortable. Even though I knew it needn’t be – after all, it was just a stage, it wasn’t a Gestapo interrogation centre!

Yet once a fear memory is there, it’s there! Once it’s encoded, it takes a good deal of conscious effort to de-code it (not to mention a fortune on psychotherapist’s fees). And this is why an experience of stage fright can be so impactful. It’s like all fear memories, ‘you can learn them instantly and they last a lifetime’.132 There isn’t anything else that you can learn that quickly. For all the amygdala’s brilliance in saving our lives in a crisis, its combination of instantaneousness and imprecision isn’t very useful for us on stage: ‘With a single bad experience, we can become conditioned to fear things that are totally harmless… Fear is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel: it goes for power over precision.’¹³³

But what’s really so terrifying about forgetting our lines?

The answer to that question is: all the reasons we’ve looked at so far. ‘How do you remember all those lines?’ We know that’s what many audience members applaud us for. Knowing our lines is the foundation of our craft – for the playwright, the director, our fellow actors, the people calling ‘Action!’ or the cues for light and sound. So of course if we forget our lines – if we ‘dry’ (as we say in the UK) or we ‘go up on a line’ (as they say in the US) – it can be absolutely mortifying. It’s shameful and denigrating. And it can be just as mortifying, however established or nascent our careers might be. Can you imagine if a master electrician told you that he’d forgotten how to wire a plug? It’s humiliating. And, for actors, that humiliation can be very public. That’s why stage fright can kick in just as easily for seasoned professionals with numerous awards to their names. The stakes are higher. The audience’s expectations are greater. They’re willing to pay more for a seat to watch their favourite celebrity. Not to mention those Would-Be Hopefuls and Should-Be-Me Cynics, who have a particularly critical eye. Which is why Gambon and Dukakis and Cumberbatch and Jacobi are just as vulnerable as any recent RADA graduate. So, when we forget our lines, we punish ourselves with chidings of unprofessionalism and unreliability. We shudder with shame. We lose our artistic integrity, and our anxiety is overwhelming. Anxiety, as defined by the existential psychologist Rollo May, is ‘a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality’.134 And, as actors, what could be more ‘essential to our professional existence’ than our ability to know our lines? So, if that ability is threatened by our own brains, we can suffer profound existential uncertainty.

Yet – stop for a moment! We’ve been through all this in the previous chapter. Half the time the audience is oblivious to the stumble or the hiatus, and – if they do note it – they’re ultimately profoundly forgiving. These fears and anxieties are our amygdala working overtime; they’re not the actuality of the situation. So the challenge is to ‘know the enemy’ – to suss out when the twitchy Vigilante momentarily switches to the enemy’s side.

If we know that the amygdala ‘forms opinions’ about what we should or shouldn’t fear…

If we know that ‘those opinions are very tough to change’ but they’re sometimes wrong…

If we know that an unexpected moment of stage fright could kick-start unnecessary fear alerts for our amygdala in our future performances…

If we know all these things, we can take some control and apply some conscious willpower to break the unnecessary fear-hold. If we really are nothing but ‘the thin line of the present’ – and we really do exist only in the clefts between our synapses – then we’re very adaptable as human beings and we can make all kinds of conscious changes right now…

But we’ll get to that shortly. For the moment, let’s just see which lessons we can draw from the glitches in our memory. We still need to face a few demons…

What can we learn about our memory glitches?

Of course, not all the glitches in our memory are the same. There’s a big difference between screwing up in early rehearsals (when the information is still new) and ‘drying’ on a well-known line (which can happen at any point in a run).

If it’s early in the memorising process (like the first week of rehearsals or the first night of a show or the first day on a set), we’re still in the short-term memory mode of consciously remembering our lines. Because we haven’t had time yet to repeat the information very often, our brain hasn’t made the neuronal changes that would shift it into our long-term memory. In many ways, this is the easiest to fix: we just need to rehearse or perform the piece more times.

If it’s later in the process – like Michael Crawford being haunted by the Phantom or Derek Jacobi being bothered by ‘To be or not to be’ – then it’s often because our long-term memory of the lines has gone horribly haywire. One of the glitches in the complex hard-wiring of our brain is that sometimes we can become so familiar with something – so habituated to it – that we start to think about it too much. As we saw in Chapter 1 with ‘choking’, we inadvertently yank it out of our unconscious memory (where we’d normally just get on with it automatically) back into our conscious memory (where we start to ask ourselves questions, like ‘Oooh, how do I do that?’). And quickly consciousness leads to self-consciousness, which leads to self-sabotage. Which is why long runs of a show can be just as precarious as first nights. We start to think explicitly about information that we’ve already stored implicitly. Since this is one of the most perplexing issues about losing our lines, let’s look at this phenomenon more closely.

Long-show-itis

We’ve seen how amazingly creative our brain is when it’s making interior brain-maps. It does a lot of work, and it enjoys a lot of work. It likes stimulation. It likes the fun of learning new information. And so it needs new activities on which it can focus. But if it does the same thing for any length of time and at the same level of difficulty, our brain becomes bored – and we become anxious.

It was after five months in The Permanent Way that I suffered my own acute stage fright. It seemed absurd – this late in the game, out in the provinces, and after all the adrenalin-filled exposure of London. So haunted was I by the absurdity of my nerves that I began to speak to my fellow cast members about it. And as it turned out, I wasn’t alone. Fellow actor Sam Graham was very open about the fact that he was experiencing stage fright – and about suffering it on two previous occasions. All of these occasions had happened during long runs and so he’d coined the term long-show-itis. The first time he’d suffered it, he was playing Phoebe in Declan Donnellan’s production of As You Like It:

Phoebe is a very strange character because she comes on stage about two-and-a-half hours into the play. You can already see people wondering if this new energy is of any value as they’re already absorbed in the Rosalind story. As an actor, I felt a sort of antipathy from the audience, a kind of ‘We don’t need this.’ And that of course fuels a kind of psychological angst, from which you can subconsciously create different symptoms – whether it be an undercurrent of ‘I’m shit’, or ‘Actually I don’t want to be here’. You then start questioning yourself consciously: ‘Am I doing this wrong?’135

Graham was hounded by uncertainty as to whether or not his performance of Phoebe was relevant or any good. And what happened next was curious. He found that his long-show-itis became an almost unconscious way of recreating that buzzy kind of heightened arousal that we experience early on in a run, but which inevitably dissipates over time. His brain was seeking an adrenalin rush. It wanted a fix. ‘It never happens in the early stages because you’ve got too much to think about. It creeps in when there’s a possibility of “autopilot” – when you can become a bit complacent with the ease of performance – and that for me can trigger it.’136

Graham had studied Chemistry at university, so when the shakes and the trembles started, he turned to his Chemistry training:

I thought, ‘Right, so the brain is sending signals to your nerves, and this chemical is being sent out to your synapses. Why? Is this fear?’ ‘Yes.’ So now fear is involved. ‘So, what are you frightened of?’ ‘Well, I’m frightened that maybe all this work I’m doing might actually be meaningless.’ And you ask yourself, ‘So, why are you thinking that?’ And you reply to yourself, ‘Well, in practical terms, do you really think this is going to get me another job?’ And you ask yourself, ‘Why are you asking that now? You’re supposed to be telling Shakespeare’s story!’ And all the time that you’re dialoging with yourself like this, the character’s speech is just coming out of your mouth.¹³⁷

What’s intriguing here is that there were several things going on for Graham. First of all, there were interferences between what he was thinking and the lines he was supposed to be retrieving. (As we know, that’s not uncommon with stage fright.) Second, apart from experiencing all these self-judging inner monologues and doubts about his future, he found that the words themselves were beginning to sound like gibberish:

I came up with the term ‘long-show-itis’ because I think my nerves were the result of my brain getting to the stage of knowing that the language (when spoken so often) starts to sound like nonsense – even though you’re perfectly aware of the sense of what you’re speaking. The thing about memory is that it’s basically a series of connections in the synapses in your brain, and once you’ve learnt the lines, there’s now a route map in there. It’s almost as if, after a while, the route map somehow becomes a separate entity, and you start looking at it and going, ‘What’s that strange thing? What’s that a map of?’138

And then you forget your lines.

Graham’s chemical insights were very helpful. In the last few weeks of The Permanent Way, I too had found myself questioning the actual sense of my lines. The sound of particular words suddenly seemed really weird. And, in the split-second of performance, I’d find my brain asking, ‘Did that sentence just make sense? Did those words actually mean anything?’ Antony Sher describes a similar situation, playing in the long West-End run of John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert:

After the initial excitement of opening, a long run can become something of an endurance test. Round about the halfway mark, we all started forgetting the lines, despite knowing them inside out. That was the problem, actually – we no longer knew them in a way that made sense. We were on automatic pilot, thinking about the shopping, thinking about anything other than this endlessly looping story that had entrapped us like a recurring dream.’¹³⁹

Matthew Dunster, a fellow actor in The Permanent Way, shared with me that he too was suffering performance nerves, even at this late stage in the run. Just like Graham, he had some pithy and instinctive responses that echo what we now know about the neurobiology of long-term memory:

I think what has actually happened is that we’ve advanced beyond the task. Why should our minds be restricted by 200 words on a page, four positions in a chair, one position to fetch a prop, one position to sit down with a prop? I know that when I’m saying my lines, I’m inhabiting them just as much as I ever did, and I’m inhabiting the moves just as much as I ever did… But my mind is four or five lines ahead, a speech ahead, the next project ahead – and there’s nothing I can do about that. My mind is more athletic than the task that I’m currently applying it to. And I think that’s why we’re forgetting stuff: our minds have outgrown the focus.140

Again, Dunster was suffering brain interference, and it was in danger of jeopardising his retrieval of the lines. It’s strange that when we stand outside ourselves as actors, we occasionally glimpse – in short, disembodied bursts – the mild madness of what we do for a profession. This madness finds all sorts of expression during long runs – because that’s when the adrenalin kick inevitably wears off and we have the headspace to afford ourselves some out-of-body experiences. After three months of performing Another Country in the West End, Kenneth Branagh and his cast – all in their early twenties – were overwhelmed with bouts of laughter:

The hysterical corpsing was partly induced by the unusual demands of a long run on inexperienced actors. After three months, I began to go a little stir crazy… my concentration wavered in performance until I dried desperately in the middle of one show and had to walk off while Rupert [Graves] saved the day with an ad lib – ‘I think Judd must have a headache or something.’ This produced terrible stage fright for the next two weeks.¹⁴¹

With The Permanent Way, it was deeply reassuring to face the fear with Sam Graham and Matthew Dunster. The ease with which they shared their articulate insights into what they were experiencing allowed me to feel that my own sensations were perfectly normal. Up until then, I’d felt horribly isolated and secretly alienated. In fact, the conversations with Graham and Dunster were so poignant that they’ve stuck with me ever since. And in many ways, those conversations prompted me to write this book. Talking to them convinced me that the more we collectively look the demons in the eye and acknowledge their normal, biochemical reality, the less scary and persistent they can be.

Something that Sam Graham said struck a chord in me. Because our brain operates by making maps of our experiences, we have to be sure that we don’t create new maps that lock in our stage fright as the norm. If that happens, we’re in danger of developing what’s known as sensitisation.

Sensitisation

Sensitisation is the opposite of habituation. Putting it simply, habituation involves us tuning out any unnecessary distractions that are benign and unimportant. (Such as the sounds of backfiring motorbikes and braking buses outside the theatre). On the other hand, sensitisation involves us learning the properties of a harmful and threatening stimulus, so that we can deliberately tune into it. Sensitisation is an important part of our survival tactics. As brain scientists Squire and Kandel describe it: ‘By means of sensitization, people and animals learn to sharpen their defensive reflexes in preparation for withdrawal and escape.’142 For example, soldiers become sensitised to loud noises: ‘Was that a firework or a gunshot?’ But most of us aren’t soldiers in a war zone and, as we know, sometimes our amygdala’s defensive reflexes are not always appropriate. Here’s why…

When we learn a new memory, our brain locks it in by decreasing synaptic connections as much as by increasing them. In other words, it can only create a new brain map by killing off some of the old (now redundant) neuronal connections and basically freeing up more space. (It’s a bit like our mobile devices really: ‘I don’t need those applications any more, so let’s free up some bytes. Trash.’) What happens when we become habituated to something is that our brain doesn’t need that particular memory map any more. So it decreases the strength of those connections in order to use them for something else. And if there isn’t anything else that immediately needs attention, our brain becomes bored. So it occupies itself with new activities. (Maybe it’ll start looking for potential dangers or creating an adrenalin buzz.)

In fact, this could be the very root of our stage fright when we’re performing in long runs. It could be that our brain becomes so habituated to our performance that it reckons it doesn’t need that brain map any more. So, subtly, during the run, it decreases the synaptic connections that comprised the map in the first place – even though we still absolutely need that map in order to give our performance every night! Which could be why Sam Graham described his long-show-itis in terms of the route map becoming a separate entity. It’s almost as if the map of our character’s lines becomes detached from the intergalactic mother ship of the whole production. And, like a space-capsule with its oxygen line umbilically floating behind it, it spins out into the darkness of the abyss that leads us straight towards stage fright.

It’s really important that we understand what’s going on here. And we need to be on our guard. Because if our brain really is decreasing the synaptic connections to our character map (even though we still need it), this could be doubly problematic. Not only could our memory of the character’s lines weaken, but now there’s also space in our brain to make some new connections – connections that might have nothing to do with our performance. (Indeed, it could start actively looking for those potential dangers and creating that adrenalin buzz.) This is exactly where that twitchy Vigilante, the amygdala, springs into derring-do action…

With habituation (as we know), our brain alters because it’s exposed to repeated presentations of the same stimulus. (That’s how we learn our lines. We repeat them over and over and over, so that the brain can change its proteins and create a map of our lines.)

However, with sensitisation, we only have to experience a threatening stimulus one single time. And that one time alone is enough for us to respond way more vigorously to a whole heap of other stimuli that have nothing to do with the threat. In fact, they could be totally harmless.143 So, if our ever-curious brain is looking for something to occupy it when it gets bored during a long run, then that backfiring bike outside the theatre or that braking bus suddenly sounds like a terrorist attack. Maybe that’s a little extreme – but you get the point. When we’re in a highly sensitised state, a totally harmless, unconnected distraction suddenly becomes weighted with imagined danger.

What I’m driving at here is that, when we suffer stage fright, two particular processes seem to kick into action, and they’re linked to habituation and sensitisation. First of all, our bored mind is unhelpfully habituated to our onstage activity. (‘Okay, I know these lines… I know these moves… Yawn, yawn.’) So, it starts to scout for any new stimuli to keep it busy while we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing on the stage. Then if we suddenly forget our lines even for a milli-moment, that powerful kick of adrenalin could be just the very thing that our bored brain latches on to.

Then, that jolt out of habituation seems to trip the switch on our sensitisation. Our pounding heart prompts our brain to perceive that momentary memory lapse as disruptive and threatening. So now our brain is on the alert to see all kinds of other stimuli as disruptive and threatening – even when they’re not. So my moment of distraction with The Permanent Way – ‘Wow! The audience really are close, aren’t they?’ – gave my bored brain something to grapple with – a new buzz, a new fix. Once I got off stage, it didn’t take long for me to become sensitised to a whole heap of other things that really weren’t that scary:

‘Oh my God! Max Stafford-Clark is out there!’

‘Oh my God! This audience is terrifying!’

‘Oh my God! I’ll never work in British theatre again!’

My amygdala had done ‘A-grade’ work. It had vigorously responded to a mildly disquieting moment and had turned it into a five-act melodrama. From that moment on, my brain was sensitised to perceiving every other audience as threatening and scary, and for a long time I lost all the pleasure of live performance. And all because of one, tiny, momentary, interfering distraction.

When we don’t know about sensitisation, we can start to create in our own synapses a fear-ridden connection between something that’s benign (a regular audience who have happily paid to see a good show) and something that we imagine to be detrimental to our personal and professional survival (a critical mass of Gestapo-like interrogators determining our destiny). If we keep tuning into our stage fright, we then start to create an enduring, long-term memory map of that very fear. We start habituating ourselves to fear. And if we’re not careful, we convince ourselves that we’re going to forget the lines again. Like Robin Williams, our mantra becomes, ‘It won’t work. It won’t work. I’ll forget the lines. Oh no!’ That dread then becomes our norm, instead of just getting on with the art we love.

Fortunately – as the pioneering behaviourist Ivan Pavlov discovered with his salivating dogs – our brain is highly adaptable. His drooling dogs only responded to the bell as long as the food was brought. As soon as the food no longer appeared, it didn’t take long for the drooling to stop as the canine brains reconditioned themselves. It’s true for us too. We can stop our brain from maxing-out at the mere mention of a matinee. In fact, we have the power to recondition our brain to respond to whatever we choose…

How Can We Create Strategies for Reconditioning Our Brain?

Our recovery from performance anxiety can actually be remarkably available to us. Our brain is very resilient and adaptable, and, since our brain is where our stage fright begins, it can be exactly where it ends. Indeed, nothing is more up for change than the human brain. We’ve already seen that whatever we think or feel or do is the result of changes in our neurons. And since repetition and practice are the means to secure those changes, then it stands to reason that the more we practise the anxiety of stage fright, the more we’ll bed it in. Conversely, the more we practice the pleasure of being on stage, the more we’ll bed that in. And for the purposes of overcoming stage fright, I’d suggest the latter is our favoured approach! So how can we go about that?

Repeat the thoughts we want to have

We know that it costs our brain cells quite a lot of energy to change for the long term. So, that change will only happen if our brain is absolutely certain that the effort warrants the change. This means that we have a huge amount of conscious power over whether we want to condition ourselves to stage fright or stage pleasure. We can either allow the actuality of standing in the wings or in front of the camera to persistently distress us. (And if that’s what we want, then – like I say – we’ll build the long-term memory of distress, and then distress will become be our newly formed map.) Or we can consciously and repeatedly connect to the excitement of the story or the magic of standing in the wings or the transformation of stepping out of the makeup trailer – or whatever the experience might be. Let’s go back to Stefan Klein’s quotation: ‘Only when the stimuli that are to be linked in the memory have appeared together often enough do new bridges grow in the brain.’144 So don’t link together acting and anxiety! It’s as conscious as that. Keep repeating pleasure and keep practising performance joy!

But only if that’s what we want…

Ask ourselves what we really want

Let’s remember: we choose to act. No one forces us to. This isn’t the army; we’re not in a military state.

Let’s also remember that, because we have so much agency to change our brain, we can create whichever brain maps will serve us in the long run. If our stage fright is actually because we don’t want to act any more and we’re looking for a reason to give it up, then let that be our choice. If our stage fright is a temporary mis-linking of the pleasure and pain experiences of acting, then we can change our thinking. As Klein expresses it so pithily, ‘Positive feelings tell us what we should do, negative feelings tell us what not to do.’¹⁴⁵ Horse-racing announcer Tom Durkin had a funny way of putting it, when he was dealing with his own performance anxiety:

Let’s say you’re hitting your head with a hammer. The first thing you do is mask the pain, so you take an aspirin. It still hurts, so you put on a football helmet. But it’s still hurting. And it’s hurting so much your brains are rocking back and forth. At some point, you realize, ‘What if I didn’t hit myself with a hammer?’¹⁴⁶

We’ll know if we don’t want to act any more, because it’ll feel like we’re hitting ourselves over the head with a hammer. Conversely, we’ll know if we don’t want to feel stage fright any more – because that will feel like we’re hitting ourselves over the head with a hammer. As Klein says, ‘Feelings of happiness aren’t a coincidence but the consequence of right thoughts and actions.’¹⁴⁷ This isn’t just positive thinking: it’s biologically accurate. In fact, it’s all about the chemicals…

We’ve already seen that what we think affects the chemicals in our brain: there’s a very direct link between our imagination and our brain’s architecture. So when we’re depressed by our fears and doubts, the levels of the chemical neurotransmitter, serotonin (which is responsible for our mood, memory and learning), sink in our brain, and our neurons can die. Yet as soon as we’re in a positive frame of mind, the levels of serotonin and dopamine (the neurotransmitter responsible for our well-being) rise. Rather than dying, our brain can then make new neurological connections. You really could say, our happiness starts in our head.

And I repeat – we don’t have to be actors. If acting doesn’t make us happy any more, then we’ll find something else we can do instead. If we can’t live without it, then we’ll work to create new brain maps that signpost our pleasure not our fear. Little by little, through ongoing repetition and practice, we’ll recondition our mind to disassociate acting from terror. For two long years, Derek Jacobi avoided the stage and lived in purgatory – ‘and it really was purgatory, for I was being put through all those exposures of vulnerability, self-pity, speechlessness and self-doubt’.148 And he knew that never again would he take his memory for granted. Yet, after two years of this purgatory, the Royal Shakespeare Company offered Jacobi a series of juicy roles – and he simply couldn’t resist live theatre any longer:

It took a long time before the panic wore off. Every day I still dreaded the thought of having to do it, of having to go on stage. I had this terrible disease, and the cure anyway, I was told, would be to actually face it head on. I had to get back on the stage and do a whole series of make-or-break parts. It was tough, and only by creating momentum did I have a chance of blasting my way out of difficulty.¹⁴⁹

‘Blasting his way out of difficulty’ was basically Derek Jacobi’s way of reconditioning his brain. And blasting, it certainly was! Like a gymnast who has fallen off the beam and knows that they have to get back on it, Jacobi took on Much Ado About Nothing, Cyrano de Bergerac, Peer Gynt and The Tempest in quick succession. With that amount of lines to learn, he surely did blast his way out of his stage fright. We really can condition ourselves – thanks to the changing of our neurons – to overcome and to do pretty much anything we want.

Overview

In this chapter, we’ve looked at the role of our brain in memory and stage fright. We’ve addressed the nature of memory and its basic brain circuitry. We’ve examined the three steps of Plato’s memory system – encoding, storing and retrieving. This took us on a mini-voyage into neuroscience and the way in which our brain creates maps. This enabled us to go deeper into the processes of encoding (through our senses, our perception of space, and imagining a place in the loci method); storing (through attention, repetition, meaning, downtime and muscle memory); and retrieving (through habituation and the theatre architecture). And that deeper scientific knowledge helped us note some practical strategies. Then, we faced what happens when retrieving our lines goes wrong and the Vigilante amygdala fires us up (through ‘long-show-itis’ and sensitisation). And finally we contemplated the power that we have to recondition our brain (by understanding how to deal with the amygdala and create the experiences we want).

*

At the end of the day, learning lines is a very personal activity. Finding our own process is both important and challenging, especially in the rehearsal room. When I asked actor-director Donald Carrier, ‘Do you think directors judge actors by the speed at which they learn their lines?’ he replied:

Yes, I do. I think an actor who has a problem learning their lines is somehow thought by a director to be inferior or lazy or someone who doesn’t apply themselves. And there are actors who are lazy, who just don’t learn the lines, who fudge around and then finally get down to learning the text. And other people just have to work very hard at it.150

In this chapter, we’ve certainly negotiated how we can work hard at learning our lines by understanding what’s going on in the grey matter. So now let’s turn our attention to what goes on in the black box, and see how our memory is shaped and sharpened by our all-important relationship with our directors in rehearsal.