4. What Goes On in the Rehearsal Room?

A ‘magical, creative’ place

A rehearsal room is a peculiar place. Its fluorescent lights and plastic chairs. Its angular floor-tapings in black and green that mark out on the lino (or brown nylon carpet) a sketch of the world we’re about to create: the portals and staircases, bedrooms and pirate ships. Not to mention that strangely distinctive smell of ‘blood, sweat and tears’ – and the vague aroma of bleach. For all this hodgepodge of sensory stimulation, the rehearsal room is a place where (as Max Stafford-Clark says) ‘magic and creation can happen.’152 And it’s pretty much the same with television and film, the main difference being that we’re rehearsing in the actual performance location. Wherever we are, the birthing process that takes place in that magic space can last for several weeks with Dr Faustus or a matter of minutes with Doctor Who. And whatever happens during that invaluable rehearsal time can make or break our final performance.

Given all the variables of that birthing process, we should give some serious attention to the relationship between the actor and the director (the ‘midwife’, you could say). In this chapter, we focus predominantly on theatre, where the contact between the actor and the director is usually more extended; so it tends have more impact on our state of creative well-being. First of all, we put the actor-director relationship under the microscope. Then – since our stage fright can ignite in performance as a result of what happened in rehearsal – we look at how to create a good rehearsal environment. This leads to the principles of rehearsing, and I offer some new approaches to ‘experiencing’ a role. And we finish with two cautionary tales about how we handle our rehearsal-incubated fear. (The first tale shows what happens when we feel disconnected from our partners, and the second takes a detailed look at working with new writing.) So let’s start by looking at the complex dynamics of the actor-director relationship.

The Actor-Director Relationship

It’s a frightening and very daring thing that you’re asking actors to do, so you need to treat them with care. As directors, we sit in our chairs and say, ‘Go down there and do that for me. Go over there and be marvellous. Go up there and have some sex. Go over there and humiliate yourself. – And I’ll just tell you whether or not it’s working.’ Actors go down the mines for us as directors. They go out into the jungle for us. And we sit here and don’t have to mess ourselves up.153

With wry self-awareness, Mike Alfreds describes the curious working relationship between actor and director, a relationship that he also describes as being ‘the most critical in the creation of a production’.¹⁵⁴ From the minute we enter the rehearsal room or film set, we all have a secret bond of faith in each other. After all, it’s our job as actors and directors to work together to create the vision of the piece. And yet we may not even know each other. We may have met only fleetingly at the audition. Or – if we recorded our audition on tape – we may not have met the director at all. And – if it’s television – the casting director may have had more input than the director. So immediately the spirit of collaboration between us requires mutual respect, generosity and humour. Yes, indeed – before we’ve even started working on the script, we’re using all manner of human attributes to lay the best foundations for our collaboration.

So what sorts of qualities do we hope as actors that our directors will bring to the rehearsal room? Here are a handful of answers: Focus. Professionalism. Laughter. A quality of playfulness and ease so that we can take some risks and be inventive. A sense that the director believes in us and has faith that we’ll be able to do whatever they’re asking us to do. And a sense of forgiveness if we can’t get what they want straight away. ‘I want the director to have a method but not a restrictive one,’ writes Antony Sher, ‘and to possess an open, enquiring mind.’155 In other words, a structure with elastic boundaries.

So, what kinds of strategies do directors adopt in the rehearsal room to help us keep our stage fright at bay? Here are a couple of invaluable insights from two leading directors:

‘I try to work on simple principles,’ says Rufus Norris:

If the actor feels empowered, if the issues in the script that didn’t support an actor’s thought processes have been dealt with, if the actor can at any point come to the director and say, ‘I have a problem’ – then the issue of stage fright in a full-on way doesn’t seem to arise. Or at least I have no memory of it happening on any show I’ve directed (which doesn’t mean that it hasn’t, of course).¹⁵⁶

‘Basically,’ says Mike Alfreds:

you try to create an atmosphere where people just want to come to rehearsals. I think it’s actually about being a decent human being, and being as nice as you can in rehearsals. Giving actors the feeling that they’re being supported. The feeling that you care about them… Giving them time. Not rushing them. Being warm with them. Making sure that if you’re being critical, you’re being honest but not unpleasant. The fact that you share your process with them. The fact that you say, ‘I don’t know. I’ve got an idea and I’m giving you some boundaries and directions, but I’m not sure – so let’s see together.’157

It’s reassuring to hear a director with the impressive profile of Mike Alfreds saying so candidly that he doesn’t have all the answers. After all, this is rehearsal. We should all be able to experiment and maybe even fail – and that includes the director. Yet it’s a big deal – hoping that a director will be willingly vulnerable – especially given the unequal status that underpins our working relationship. We all know that, however collaborative and nurturing a director may be, at the end of the day they’re the boss. The buck (usually) stops with them. So, in terms of the interpersonal dynamics, there’s an unavoidable power-play.

The play of power

For most of us actors, we got the job because of the director: it’s rarely the other way round. So inevitably there’s a power bias in the relationship. (Mike Alfreds addresses many of these issues very insightfully in Chapter 5 of his book Different Every Night.)¹⁵⁸ Young actors can be particularly aware of this power bias. Antony Sher describes how he felt at the start of his career: ‘Actors are taught to be passive, to be grateful for any work, to do as they’re told, to not think for themselves, to leave everything to daddy director.’¹⁵⁹ And even as we grow in experience, there can be a certain undercurrent of ‘they’re important – we’re dispensable’. So it’s a relationship that can flicker with fear from the get-go, and the desire to impress our director in rehearsals can be very seductive. Especially if it’s a famous director. Or a director we’ve not worked with before. Or a director whose work we particularly admire. Or a director who is known for being scary! The ‘old school’ directors (usually the male of the species) were renowned for being ‘snide and arch and rude and they had whipping boys and they bullied actors into performance. No decent work can come of that,’ says Alfreds. ‘It may be very efficient, slick and “professional”, but the performances will be dead at heart.’160 Most directors nowadays are compassionate and creative and considerate. They want to collaborate and they certainly want us to succeed. Nonetheless, the mere identity of the director can surreptitiously stir our stage fright even before we’ve started. Not that a tinge of trepidation need be a bad thing. A little bit of awe can ramp up our game. If we’re familiar with a director’s body of work – if we know they’ve directed the great and the good – it can encourage us to give our best shots, at the same time as knowing we’re undoubtedly going to learn something from them and thereby evolve our own craft.

At the end of the day, the power dynamic pivots on trust. We have to feel safe enough to make mistakes in front of these powerful people, as there’s no way we can give our final performance at our first rehearsal. At the same time, the power isn’t purely one-sided: they cast us because they trust us enough to come up with the goods. So, yes indeed – trust lies at the heart of our actor-director relationship.

Trusting the director

Basically as actors, we have to trust our directors. They’re the outside eye, the direct mirror into our souls. They can appraise what we’re doing. They can sense the bigger picture. They can see all kinds of things of which we’re simply not aware. And that’s because, when we’re building a character, we’re engaged in two complicated activities at the same time. On the one hand, we’re creating our character (which requires us to be in a certain state of unconscious inspiration). On the other hand, we’re evaluating what we’re creating (which requires us to be in a certain state of conscious assessment and improvement).¹⁶¹ The ‘creative’ component draws upon the right hemisphere of our brain, while the ‘evaluating’ aspect draws upon the left hemisphere of our brain (using the ideas of psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist).162 This is a very delicate operation that we’re undertaking in rehearsal – striving to be playful and open while being constructive and critical. In fact, these two hemispheres are almost like two people in our heads seeing the world in two completely different ways. Our right hemisphere relates to other people and the environment in a spontaneous, fluid manner. Our left hemisphere, by contrast, likes control and stasis: it wants to fix our creative discoveries. So the challenge, particularly in rehearsal, is to have the two sides of our brain in a healthy relationship with each other. Too much right-brain creativity and we can’t necessarily repeat what we did for the twentieth take or the thirtieth performance. Too much left-brain activity and we fix, control, and ossify our otherwise inspired performance.

This is why we need to trust our director. In the throes of rehearsal, we simply can’t keep that balance without an outside eye. We can’t accurately assess if what we’re feeling inside is effectively coming across to our audience. We can’t remember every detail of what we did each time and improve upon it every time we run a scene. So the director has to be our Best Audience of One. They have to laugh in the right places, applaud our good moments, critique our rocky moments, and reflect back to us why those moments aren’t working. Our trust in this relationship is complex – and here are just three reasons why…

First of all, every actor has a different creative process. If there are fifteen of us in the rehearsal room, that means fifteen working methods. Not only does the director have to suss out our particular ways of working, but they then have to use that understanding to bring out the best in each of us.

Second, we have to trust that that really is what they’re trying to do. As actors, we know we’re being evaluated: that’s almost the point of rehearsal, as Robert Benedetti indicates in the opening quotation of this chapter. The director has to evaluate whether a scene is working. And if it’s not, how can we fix it? The director has to evaluate whether our choices are telling the story. And if they’re not, how can we adapt them? Given all that evaluation, the power dynamics of the relationship can inadvertently trigger our sensitivity. If we’re feeling at all unsure about what we’re doing, the microscope of our own scrutiny can persuade us that we’re being judged on something far more personal than the mechanics of the scene. And this is where some subtle seeds of stage fright can be planted. ‘Do they think I’m any good? Are they regretting that they cast me? Will they forgive me if I’m not yet up to par?’ And perhaps the edgiest question triggered by our twitchy, survivalist amygdala is: ‘Will they ever employ me again…?’

Third, we’re being evaluated within an environment where failure has to be an option. As actors, we have to be able to experiment in rehearsals. We can only be at our creative best if we feel we can try out various choices – and some of them simply might not work. Having the confidence to make a bold choice – to risk that choice being wrong and to trust that the director won’t then question our fundamental talent (or lack thereof) – are vital conditions of the actor-director relationship. As Miles Anderson articulates it:

Playing a character requires us to go from A to Z in our creative palette. If I’m frightened of falling down and looking stupid and making a fool of myself, I’ll only ever go from A to G. If as actors we’re afraid of pushing the boundaries and looking ridiculous, how will we ever know where Y and Z are? We’ll never play those moments – because we’ll always step back from them, always be afraid of them. Actors rarely use rehearsals for being able to stretch the boundaries and see how far they can go with something – because they don’t want to be known as being ‘bad’– even in rehearsal. Yet you have to be bad. You have to be allowed to be bad. You have to be able to risk something and go somewhere, rather than risk nothing and go nowhere.163

He’s absolutely right. We need to be willingly vulnerable in rehearsals. And this kind of courage also requires us to have a certain objectivity about what we do. We need a healthy, creative distance – not only from our own work, but eventually from our director.

The necessary distancing

The actor-director relationship is just like any other relationship that involves a huge amount of interdependency. ‘Will we bring out the best in each other? Will we make each other look good? If I’m willingly vulnerable in front of you, will you respect that vulnerability?’ It’s almost impossible to ignore that kind of intimacy. Whether we actually admit it or not, we’re very aware of its tremors. The atmosphere changes – albeit subtly – whenever the director walks into the room: regardless of gender or sexuality, we know they’re there. (How many actors and directors have crushes on each other – if not love affairs and marriages?) And as much as we’re aware of the intimacy of the relationship, we’re even more aware of the distance. During the rehearsal process, the logistics of intimacy and distance become very complex. And they can subtly affect our long-term fear or confidence. But what do I mean by ‘logistically complex’? Let’s take a closer look…

When we first start rehearsing a play, we want the atmosphere to be open and trusting so that we can take all those risks that Anderson just mentioned. During that time, there’s usually lots of chat and camaraderie and nurturing dialogue with the director. And that’s why theatre rehearsals can be so much fun. Yet, as we draw nearer to the opening night, the director’s attention shifts. They’re not just concerned with us any more. They need to evaluate the details of the overall production – the lights, costumes, sound, etc. And that involves a definite distancing from us – both physically and psychologically.

The physical distance is fairly straightforward. When we’re in the rehearsal room, the director is literally very close to us – just a few feet or metres away. Some directors step right into the rehearsal space to direct. Some stick determinedly behind a table. Either way, they’re still very close. And if the rehearsal room is small, the director is rarely out of our eyeline. When it comes to television, our brief rehearsal can be even more intimate. The director stands right next to us so that, amid all the hubbub of technical prep, they can hear how we’re delivering our lines, and, likewise, we can hear their direction. As soon as the camera starts to roll or as soon as we get into the actual theatre space, that physical distance increases. And the director fades from our view – both literally and metaphorically.

The psychological distancing in our relationship is a little more complicated. At first, as actors, we can be quite reliant on our director. We want to give them whatever they envision. So we try to develop a dialogue with them that’s intimate enough for us to check that we’re doing okay, but cool enough for us not to take it personally if they’re not yet happy with our choices. As we draw closer to tech rehearsals, their psychological intimacy with us fades at the same time as their physical proximity – because they have to shift their attention to the overall production. When the director stops being so connected to our rehearsal process, it can actually make us feel a bit uncertain. In psychology, there’s a phenomenon known as ‘separation anxiety’.164 When a little creature first discovers its independence, it becomes very enthralled with itself and is totally self-absorbed. Then it suddenly notices its distance from its mother, and it stops being enthralled with itself and instead it becomes anxious about that separation. It’s exactly the same for us as actors. There’s often a point in rehearsal where the director has helped us to uncover all kinds of new and exciting interpretations and we’re really enthralled with ourselves. Then we start doing runthroughs and tech rehearsals, and suddenly the director becomes more distant. In fact, they may only be communicating with us through note sessions. And even those note sessions become less and less frequent and more and more impersonal. At that point, we sometimes experience twinges of separation anxiety. Like a child being sent to school, we can feel a bit abandoned. Now we realise that we really are out there on our own – on that big, wide stage. And that can trigger mild – or even mounting – stage fright. That said, there are times when we totally welcome this distance, not least with the pressure of previews.

The peculiar nature of previews

Previews are strange experiences in their own right. They’re performances in the sense that the public is there and they’ve paid for their tickets. But in a way, they’re still rehearsals, as we know things may change from preview to preview – staging, sound cues, lines even, let alone our interpretations. Actor John Cariani sums up the proximity-distance ambivalence of previews very clearly:

The figure of the director is right there at the beginning of rehearsals – and sometimes it can even be a bit suffocating. Then as my performance starts to grow more confident, I metaphorically push the director away – and that’s thrilling. Once we go into tech, he’s starting to get farther away. Sometimes, though, he metaphorically comes closer, and while I’m out there on the stage, I feel as if I can see him all the time in my peripheral vision. Not that I can actually see him, but there’s a little ‘thing’ of him always around. And then in that first preview – if you make a mistake or you do something he asked you not to do – he metaphorically comes right into your face. And to keep him away, you silently say, ‘I know, I know! I didn’t do that on purpose! I’m going to fix it tomorrow night.’ All that stuff is going through your head at the same time as the play. Which makes previews alive in a very different way from any other performance.165

Previews are becoming more and more peculiar with the omnipresence of mobile devices. And this is where it’s important that everyone – audience and all – can understand what we go through as actors on the stage, so that we can preserve the unique and wonderful realm of live performance. Here’s what I mean…

In August 2015 – a couple of weeks before the official opening of Hamlet at the Barbican Centre – Benedict Cumberbatch found that the previews of his performance were not only being reviewed by the national press, they were actually being filmed by the public on their mobile phones. One night during ‘To be or not to be’, Cumberbatch had to stop and restart the speech due to technical difficulties. This speech is one of the hardest places to begin any performance, advised Cumberbatch to his fans. (In fact, it’s the speech that tripped the switch on Derek Jacobi’s stage fright. Which is hardly surprising, since this is probably the most famous speech in the English-language canon, so everyone wants to see how each celebrity will deliver it.) Speaking to his fans at the stage door, Cumberbatch told them that during the performance he could see ‘a little red light’ of a mobile phone shining in the third row. ‘It’s mortifying,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing less supportive or enjoyable as an actor, being on stage experiencing that.’166

This was, after all, a preview. The actors, the technical team, and all involved need these previews to coordinate the elements in front of a live audience. It’s part of the excitement. (I was at the first preview of Billy Elliot, and we didn’t leave the theatre till midnight because so many technicalities went awry. It didn’t matter: we all knew that we were experiencing a unique event.) In support of Cumberbatch and the Hamlet production, the critic for The Stage, Mark Shenton, stressed that ‘a lot will change between the first preview and first night. As critics, it is our job to respect the artistic process; and part of the process is an acknowledgement that they need previews to work on their show before we pass judgment.’167 The professional press might honour Shenton’s words, but fans are fans – and the public wants a piece of the newsfeed pie. Like I said in Chapter 2, every spectator is a reviewer now and every night is a press night.

These issues surrounding previews raise important questions about the nature of rehearsal. At the end of the day, it’s us – the actors – who have to step out there, onto that stage or in front of that camera. And we know that that can be scary. One of the solutions to the tremors surrounding previews and performances goes back to the fundamental actor-director relationship. We have to know that we have the understanding and support of our directors till the birthing process is over. As a director, Mike Alfreds really gets it:

Being an actor is all about being frightened. I think that goes with the territory and actors almost want to be frightened. I think that’s the excitement – because it’s so exposing being an actor. You’re getting out onto the stage and you’re saying to the audience, ‘Look at me, look at my body, look at my voice, look at my taste, look at my judgement, look at my sense of humour, look at my emotional expressivity, look at my sexuality. Look at me!’ Some actors do believe that they’re hiding behind a character – but that’s nonsense really because you can never hide. And it’s a very frightening thing. I think all the problems I’ve ever had in rehearsals were very much about actors feeling very threatened.¹⁶⁸

All the more reason for us to feel absolutely confident in whatever we’ve rehearsed, because – preview or press night – it’s us out there.

Yet that doesn’t always happen. Not all directors are like Alfreds or Norris or Stafford-Clark, to name but three. Sometimes our stage fright in performance can be directly traced back to moments in rehearsal when we didn’t own the choices being made. In those situations, we find that we become literally – and metaphorically – blocked. Despite all the conditions that we all collectively strove to put in place in order to keep the rehearsal room creative, sometimes things go disquieteningly askew.

Unlocking the blocking

There are times when a director has a very specific vision for a production. And if we click with that vision – fantastic! We feel confident. We can flow in the rehearsal room. It’s great. But if we can’t find our way into that vision, it’s incredibly hard for us to flow, and we silently dislocate both from our director and from our own performance.

In fact, Stanislavsky suffered his most acute stage fright when his relationship with the director broke down in exactly this way, and on more than one occasion. When he was playing Brutus in Julius Caesar for Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1903, he simply couldn’t ‘find’ what he thought the director wanted. ‘I see the tone and tempo of the second act, especially for Brutus, absolutely differently from you,’ wrote Nemirovich-Danchenko. ‘And I intend to follow my line without restraint.’169 In the end, Stanislavsky’s confidence was so destroyed that he had to pull out of the production. Fourteen years later, the situation was just as bad. At the dress rehearsal of The Village of Stepanichikovo in 1917, Stanislavsky was left weeping in the wings when, as ‘a typical producer-dictator’ (as he described it), Nemirovich-Danchenko ruthlessly suppressed the actor’s deviation from his instructions for the role of Colonel Rostanev – and he pulled Stanislavsky from the show.¹⁷⁰ Stanislavsky was significantly immersed in his ‘system’ by that time, and he really wanted actors to create characters in the way that they perceived them – not as the director conceived them. Clearly, he and Nemirovich-Danchenko were not a winning team.

Although these situations are fairly extreme, it’s reassuring to know that even Stanislavsky couldn’t always incarnate his director’s vision. Yet these stories raise a useful point. We have to find a delicate balance in rehearsals between the actor’s process and the director’s result. It can be very dangerous if we find ourselves trying to play the ‘final result’ in performance, simply because we weren’t able to own the process in rehearsal. It can lead to interference in our heads, and, as we know, interference can lead to stage fright. If we try to play our director’s superimposed form without any of our own imaginative connection, we can all too easily go hurtling into the abyss. We literally become blocked by the blocking. Here’s an example…

Playing Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing at a prestigious Shakespeare festival in the States, Donald Carrier struggled for a five-month run to overcome his nerves in the opening scene. He and his fellow cast members couldn’t fully understand the stage picture that the director had set in rehearsal. There hadn’t been very much explanation behind the blocking, and so the actors were finding it challenging to retain the action because they didn’t really own it. ‘I still feel there might be other possibilities and other options that we’ve never gone to,’ said Carrier. ‘So a part of my brain feels a certain discomfort.’171 That discomfort subtly stirred Carrier’s performance anxiety. Even towards the end of the five-month season, he had to run over that scene a couple of times in his head before each show just to feel secure about it: ‘I’m still not entirely happy with how it was eventually staged. The physical life and the psychological actions are just not quite matched – and that’s when I get into trouble.’¹⁷²

Let’s rewind for a moment. Let’s go back to the rehearsal room and see where the seed of that performance anxiety was planted. Early in rehearsal, Carrier had been encouraged to explore a certain sadness in Don Pedro about the potential loss of his friend, Benedick. Later in rehearsals, that choice was jettisoned without a wholly clear explanation and, instead, it was suggested to Carrier that Don Pedro is not sad, but rather he’s happy. In fact, he’s actually enthusiastic about Benedick’s marriage to Beatrice. Of course, a director might change the blocking of a scene for all manner of reasons that make sense in the bigger picture of the production, though as actors we may not be able fully to perceive that perspective while we’re enacting the moves. And if we don’t fully own those staging choices, the seeds of doubt can be planted in us. As Carrier discovered:

When it came to performance, my brain kept asking, ‘Where did that intention come from?’ The physical life of the scene [which was still informed by the old choice of being sad] was not supporting the action that I was now trying to play (which was to be encouraging and enthusiastic towards my friend). As a result, my performance in that section is kind of ‘stand and deliver’ (for lack of a better phrase). It’s what I call ‘reportage acting’. My character is saying, ‘I’ll do this and this’, but there’s nothing dynamically happening between us as actors to support those words… It gives me great anxiety before I play that moment, and it’s a scene in which I’m constantly afraid of losing the lines.173

Carrier’s stage fright in performance was the consequence of an issue in rehearsal. He was self-aware and generous enough to pinpoint exactly what the issue had been. Because Don Pedro is essentially a supporting role rather than a leading role, he didn’t feel able – in a short rehearsal period – to insist that the scene wasn’t working. Although he tried to address it several times, he was placated with, ‘No, this is fine. It’s good. There’s nothing wrong with this scene.’ ‘It’s always difficult,’ he noted, ‘when you’re not one of the main characters, as you don’t want to take up valuable rehearsal time or be perceived as the “squeaky wheel”. So you just try and make it work.’¹⁷⁴

Finding the courage to really be heard when the ‘blocking’ is doing just that – blocking us – is incredibly hard. Of course we want to do everything we can to nurture and sustain the rehearsal-room relationship with the director. After all, it’s their overall vision that we’re incarnating. And a serious breakdown in communication can really spur our stage fright. To some extent, the problem lies in the word ‘blocking’ itself. Whenever I’m directing, I try not to use the word – because ‘blocking’ does just that. It blocks us as actors when we need to be able to flow. Besides, actors aren’t ‘blocks’ – they’re living, breathing, interpreting, intuiting, imaginative, human beings. If (as Rufus Norris states) a director enables the actors to come to them at any point and say, ‘I’ve got a problem’ and it can all be discussed – then there is no problem. If, on the other hand, the director isn’t able to accommodate the problem for whatever reason, then there is a problem. To an extent, it all boils down to director-training. The kind of dynamics we’re talking about here – the balance between the actor’s process and the director’s vision – is something young directors can’t learn in the classroom. This sort of intricate knowledge only really comes about through hard graft and experience.

So you can see how provocative and exciting the actor-director relationship can be. It’s packed with power. It teeters on trust. Sometimes we find ourselves on a roller coaster of intimacy and distance. Sometimes we find ourselves in the hands of a master midwife. And sometimes we find ourselves locked within the blocking. So how can we ensure that the relationship is at its most creative? And what does the rehearsal environment need for it to be a hotbed of magic in which there’s minimal room for stage fright?

Creating a Good Rehearsal Environment

The prop store on the top floor of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London. The leaky, freezing cavern of the basement theatre, Moscow. The back room of a pub just off the Fulham Palace Road. These are all rehearsal rooms that I have known and loved. For all the joys of a clean and tidy studio, we can create pretty much anywhere – as long as we experience the right atmosphere among the collaborative team. As Max Stafford-Clark said, a rehearsal room is a place where magic and creation can happen. And I’d suggest that magic and creation require two important factors – play and feedback.

The power of play

The best acting teachers are children. Just watch them at play. It doesn’t take long to see the freedom and wonder that infects their natural state. And that state is innate in all of us as adults – if we’re able to give it voice. For decades, theatre gurus – including Michael Chekhov, Jacques Lecoq and Peter Brook, to name but three – have all insisted that we need to access our inner child when we’re in the creative process. In fact, one of the quickest ways to banish our stage fright is for the director to allow us (and for us to allow ourselves) to play.

All too often in rehearsals the ‘evaluation’ mode (that I mentioned earlier) morphs into the ‘judgemental’ mode. In other words, a healthy degree of ‘evaluating’ whether or not we’re telling the story mutates into an unhealthy degree of ‘judging’ whether or not we’re any good. (‘Is this what the director wants? Will I have it under my belt by Thursday?’) Yet, as my Russian mentor Vladimir Ananyev would regularly remind us during my own actor-training in Moscow, it’s impossible to play and judge at the same time. They’re two mutually exclusive actions – like simultaneously trying to open and close the door. We can’t be playfully open and fearfully closed at the same time. So in the rehearsal room we have to find some means of diverting our energy away from trying to ‘get it right’ all the time (whatever ‘right’ may be). And, instead, we should look for constructive opportunities to play.

To some extent, we’re dependent on the director’s process. If they’re able to share a portion of the rehearsal time with us thrashing about in the murky unknown of the script, it’s wonderful. That’s when we make real and unexpected discoveries. That’s when we become so absorbed imaginatively that we forget to censor ourselves. Stafford-Clark is particularly good at this. He allows chunks of rehearsal time for true, creative play. For example, one afternoon when we were working on Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, he suggested that the whole of the rehearsal building, as well as the cul-de-sac outside, was the Hardcastles’ estate. During an extended improvisation (which must have lasted for well over an hour), he gave each of us a secret objective to fulfill. By the end of the afternoon, the collected ensemble had tripled its sense of play, its dynamic interaction, and its understanding of the relationships: it was time well spent. Obviously the power of play always has to be harnessed towards the production, as it was with Stafford-Clark. Yet it doesn’t have to be quite so organised: we can aim to bring playful inventiveness all the time to our work. It just has to be relevant. And that’s where the director’s feedback comes in.

The need for feedback

The power of play switches to the play of power in our actor-director relationship when notes are given. We need notes. We need feedback. It’s how we elaborate and improve our work. Yet the specifics of how, when and how often those notes are given can have a profound affect on our confidence. Some actors like a lot of notes. Some actors like very few notes. If we don’t get any notes at all, it can be either hugely relieving or mildly disconcerting. And directors have different modes of feedback: some directors give us no notes if we’re doing well and some directors give us no notes if we’re doing terribly. Short of them telling us on day one which type of director they are, we have to figure it out for ourselves and build our own sense of faith in our performances accordingly.

How we respond to those notes is a whole other psychological task. Some actors like to be pushed. Some actors like to be coddled. No actor wants to be humiliated in the rehearsal room (as that rarely achieves anything other than adding to our performance nerves). Yet we do want to grow as artists. In fact, many of us find that wholesome feedback builds our creative strength. As actors we like to be told the truth. We like to be told when we’re doing a good job and it’s important for us to know when we’re doing a bad job. (Better to hear it in the rehearsal room while there’s still the time and intention to change it, than wait till we’re reading it in the reviews section of the Guardian or the Los Angeles Times.) Some actors want feedback to be given very directly. ‘I actually respond rather well when people tell me I’m not up to the job,’ writes Antony Sher. ‘I get quite determined.’175 Similarly, John Cariani says, ‘I don’t like to be treated carefully. I love directors who push and don’t coddle. I feel most safe in a rehearsal room when the feedback is direct – because then I know that the director cares enough not to leave me to mess up.’¹⁷⁶

Whether we prefer to be coddled or we prefer to be cajoled, there are some note-realities that we simply can’t avoid. If we’re cast in a big role, for example, we’re going to get a lot of notes. If we’re playing a complicated part, we’re going to get a lot of notes. If we’re struggling with the role, we’re going to get a lot of notes. The trick is to be sure that, when we’re receiving all those notes, we’re really hearing what the director is saying to us, rather than raising our defences. That means listening to those notes openly, rather than letting them suffocate us. In fact, the only time Stafford-Clark remembers an actor suffering stage fright in rehearsals was when he was giving him notes:

I don’t have much direct experience of actors with stage fright, but I did work with a very good actor a year ago who subsequently revealed he had not been on stage for fourteen years. He had trouble with lines and had begun to repeat the same mistakes in each runthrough. I picked him up on it each time and he began to resent it and asked me not to sit so close to the stage taking notes as it put him off. I declined and said I was simply doing my job. By about week two of the production run the lines had sunk in and there was no larger problem. In retrospect if I had recognised his problem earlier I would and should have been more sensitive.177

Stafford-Clark works a lot with new writing and he’s gloriously fastidious about the specifics of a playwright’s text. And yet we don’t have to make ourselves overly dependent on a director, whatever their status or experience.

Finding our rehearsal-room independence

Indeed, we shouldn’t be totally dependent on the director. While all these conditions for what makes a good rehearsal environment are great, we don’t have to be too needy. It’s back to the ‘necessary distancing’ – and it goes both ways. As Tanya Moodie describes:

I’ve trained myself not to need anything from a rehearsal environment and have the buck stop with me. As long as I get a mid-morning break and a mid-afternoon break, I’m good. I’ve had too many rehearsal situations become toxic, or unstable, or unreliable. I’ve had cruel directors and crazed scene partners. I’ve worked with injury and illness (mine), bereavement and drunkenness (not mine). I’ve had six-week rehearsal periods and three-day rehearsal periods… I’ve learned that feeling creatively free and supported starts and remains with me.¹⁷⁸

Moodie hits the nail on the head. The rehearsal environment can be unpredictable. The relationships between actors and directors – or actors and other actors – can be nuanced and complicated. But whatever might happen, we have to own our process.

In fact, there are all kinds of principles of rehearsing available to us. These are principles that we can adopt on our own to keep our fear at bay, while still being open and collaborative and generous in the rehearsal room. Here are just a few of them. But – be warned. They actually require us to recalibrate the nature of acting itself…

The Principles of Rehearsing

Basically, there are two main reasons why we rehearse a piece. Collectively we want to work out how to tell the story. Individually we want to build our particular characters. ‘Building A Character.’ That’s no small task. And the demon of stage fright frequently raises its head when, for some reason, we feel dislocated from the character that we’re building. Instead of just acting the role, we suddenly become aware that we’re acting the role. Or rather, we’re here and the character is there – and we’re falling into the gap between the two. To some extent, this dislocation can happen all the time (and inevitably) when we’re rehearsing, as we don’t even know what the character is yet.

But let’s just pause for a moment. What do we actually mean by ‘character’? And how can we stop ourselves feeling disconnected from it? Could there be a way of creating a character in rehearsals that never actually dislocates us from it? Perhaps it’s time to reconsider what exactly we’re doing when we’re acting.

Feeling is listening

So often, as actors, we believe we have to become the part and feel what the character feels. First of all, that’s very difficult in the fragmented process of rehearsing. We start. We stop. We discuss. We share a joke. We restage. We take a tea break. We start again. All as if we’re little Duracell rabbits that can bang the drum of our feelings at the simple flick of a switch. So we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much if we have dislocations from the character during rehearsals, as our creative flow is inevitably and constantly being interrupted.

Second, perhaps we need to change our whole philosophy. ‘Becoming the character’ is actually a misguided definition of what we do as actors. Let’s take David Mamet’s approach for a moment. We can’t ‘become’ the character, because the character doesn’t exist. It’s just lines on a page. So unless the paper-and-glue script can cry when we rip it or laugh when we scrunch it, the character doesn’t feel anything. It’s us, the actors – living, breathing, sensate human beings – who imagine and interpret and embody. We’re the ones who feel something.

Yet the truth is that we rarely let ourselves feel. In trying to feel what we think the character should feel, we bypass the Most Important Step. We Stop Listening. We stop listening to ourselves. To our own words. To our bodies. To our partner’s bodies. To our partner’s words. To the space in between us. To the director. And this lack of listening is no small surprise really. We’re so busy in rehearsals multitasking on a major scale – trying to remember our lines, trying to remember the staging, trying to be intimate with people we’ve barely met – it’s hard to really listen to anything.

And if we widen the picture…

…if we take that consideration beyond the walls of the rehearsal room…

…we actually rarely allow ourselves to listen in everyday life. Really listening to what’s going on in the world can make us incredibly vulnerable to the vast, emotional content of all the massive, global narratives. Climate change. Superbug epidemics. The ‘so-called Islamic State’. Immigration crises. The collapse of Europe. Disappearing jumbo jets. It’s all too much. Our contemporary life is such that we almost have to stop listening, for fear of imploding under the emotional weight of humanity’s current state.

So this sets up a conundrum. As actors we want to feel. Our profession gives us permission to feel. In fact, we’re professionally obliged to feel. It’s the main tool of our trade. Yet because we’ve got out of the habit of really listening in everyday life, we’ve blocked our channels of feeling at all levels of our existence. It’s no surprise that stage fright can sneak up on us, even in rehearsals. We feel dislocated from the character – because half the time we’re dislocated from ourselves.

So what can we do, as actors, to make sure we reconnect? How can we press the restart button on our own sensory existence? We can start by truly listening to ourselves in the rehearsal room. We can start by looking at what it means to play a character. We can start by asking ourselves what it really means to ‘experience’ a role – because somehow, somewhere the definition became confused.

‘Experiencing’ the role

Let’s turn back the clocks to the birth of contemporary acting and the cross-pollination between Stanislavsky and Strasberg. Somewhere in the early twentieth century, it seems as though maybe the wires got crossed when Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ migrated to New York. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, a few myths began to emerge and their grip across Western acting has been very persuasive. At its most simple, it’s the ‘I have to feel what the character feels’ epithet. And there’s no doubt that some of Stanislavsky’s own ideas about ‘becoming’ the character are very compelling. Here he is, writing about what he calls ‘the state of “I am”’:

I am in our language refers to the fact that I have placed myself in the centre of imaginary conditions, that I feel myself situated among them, that I exist in the very depth of imaginary life, in the world of imaginary things, and that I begin to act from myself, with my fear and conscience.179

‘Existing in the very depth of imaginary life.’ That’s sounds exciting!

But – stop!

Let’s look more closely.

Those last few words – ‘with my fear and conscience’. They hold a very significant clue. We know Stanislavsky was afraid as an actor. We know Stanislavsky suffered self-consciousness as an actor. What I believe he’s saying here is that when we allow ourselves to ‘become’ the character – to say, ‘I am the character’ – we’re really just integrating our two realities. We’re taking the fictional life of the character and our actual life as actors – which means our nervousness and self-consciousness as much as our creative brilliance – and we’re allowing those two lives to fuse. In other words, we’re not ignoring our fear or trying to push it away like a whining child tugging on our sleeve. Instead, we’re embracing it. We’re validating it. We’re channelling it directly into the character and alchemically turning it into something useful and not disruptive.

Let’s unpack this idea a little further…

Some people have interpreted Stanislavsky’s ‘state of “I am”’ as the point at which we’re so fused with a character that we lose our self. And sure – ‘getting lost’ in the character can seem sexy and beguiling. ‘Hey, man – I really became Hamlet or Hedda or the King of Siam or the Duchess of Malfi.’ It’s like a state of altered consciousness and that’s kind of cool… And we feel we let ourselves down – or we’re not proper actors – if we don’t experience that altered state. We’ve failed in our actor’s craft… And then we get stage fright!

Yet Stanislavsky explicitly stresses the opposite. We don’t lose our self. We fuse or merge our self – along with all our complicated feelings – with feelings that are appropriate to the character’s given circumstances. It may sound semantic and pedantic, but there’s a subtle and important difference between ‘becoming’ the character (or ‘losing ourselves’) and ‘merging’ (or ‘fusing ourselves’) with the character. In fact, there’s another tool from Stanislavsky’s toolkit that can really help us to understand the difference and (more importantly for us here) to overcome our stage fright. This term has only come to the fore in recent years. It’s what he called perezhivanie.

Perezhivanie literally translates as ‘living through’ a role. Zhivanie means ‘living’ and pere means ‘through’, and it was the term Stanislavsky adopted for ‘experiencing’ a role. And this is where our own actual experiences really can merge with the imagined experiences of the character. Let’s be clear. Living through a role doesn’t mean ‘suffering’. Living through a role doesn’t mean ‘enduring’ what the character might be enduring. Living through a role actually refers to our natural dual consciousness on stage (as we explored in Chapter 1). And what that means is that we inhabit the fictional world of the script at the same time as we’re experiencing the reality of being on stage (or in front of a camera). In other words, ‘living through’ or ‘experiencing’ a role allows all the conditions of acting to be as much a part of our here-today-now actuality as any of the fictional given circumstances.

That includes our awareness of the boom mic above our heads.

That includes our knowledge that this is a mid-shot.

That includes the passion that we’re experiencing playing Cleopatra.

That includes the fact that we’re a bit nervous about this scene.

That includes the fact that our husband is in the audience and he’s taking us out for dinner afterwards.

That includes the tears streaming down our face as we speak our character’s farewell speech.

From this perspective, there is no divide between our self and the character. The character can only feel what we’re feeling. Whatever is going on for us in this very moment can’t help but be part of our performance experience. And that’s because our brain cannot differentiate between the two worlds. (I mentioned this in Chapter 3, when we looked at the brain’s inability to differentiate between imagination and reality.) Our brain has only one experience of the present nanosecond. So we can call it ‘self’ or we can call it ‘character’ – but our brain just knows it as ‘Now’.

This is incredibly liberating. It releases us from the hangman’s halter of ‘I’m not feeling what the character feels. So I must be a bad actor!’ Or ‘Darn it – I just broke out of character!’ I’d actually go so far as to say that the genuine process of facing the fear and embracing our stage fright involves us recalibrating what it fundamentally means to act. We don’t have to fake anything in the rehearsal room. We just have to listen to what’s really going on. The character isn’t out there somewhere and we have to imagine our way into their existence. The character is Here-Now-Us – with all our feelings. It’s that autobiographical self that we met in Chapter 3. And it includes the adrenalin-kick of our nerves, as much as anything else. Those are very real emotions that we can’t ignore. They’re what we’re experiencing here-today-now as human beings, so let’s embrace them as a legitimate part of whatever we’re experiencing here-today-now in the role. By allowing all our complicated, contradictory sensations to be part of one unified experience, we can unite our sense of actor and character. We can truly merge with the role. And then we find we’ve bridged the abyss that can manifest as stage fright – because there’s no longer a gap between what we should feel and what we do feel. It’s all one experience!

So what does all this mean in practice?

It means we start by actually listening to ourselves in rehearsal. We acknowledge what we’re really feeling as our autobiographical self. If those feelings seem to contradict the character’s given circumstances, we then gently and imaginatively justify to ourselves why the character could be feeling what we’re feeling. So instead of saying, ‘I feel terrified, but my character is really confident – so I’m totally dislocated from that character,’ we look for reasons why the character could feel terrified. And if we work playfully, it doesn’t matter how tangential or off-the-cuff or bizarre those justifications may seem at first. Ultimately – and very cunningly – we diffuse our nerves by making them a legitimate part of what we’re allowed to feel. We con the conman. We disconcert the demon – by embracing him, not running away from him. And by doing so – he disappears – like a genie in a puff of green smoke. Enough analogies: here’s a concrete example…

I was rehearsing Richard III with the wonderful director Tina Packer at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. It was Act I, Scene iii, where Queen Margaret is cursing the royals and I was thrilled to be discovering a great sense of flow in the scene. Mare Trevathan as Elizabeth was giving me wonderful attitude. Nigel Gore as Richard was visceral and raw. It felt really good. Then one day in rehearsals, a particular staging was set up to accommodate certain sightlines. And suddenly I felt trapped. All my flow vanished and I began to experience a disconnect. I knew myself well enough to know that if I wasn’t careful, that disconnect could open up like the San Andreas Fault and gradually gape into an abyss of stage fright. Not wanting to bother a director whom I respect so much with my banal insecurities, I quietly turned to the voice coach, Margaret Jansen.

‘I feel like a bull stuck in a stall,’ I explained. ‘It was all going so well, but now I just feel blocked. I don’t even feel I can move my feet.’ Jansen’s immediate response was, ‘Fantastic! Use it! Let that be exactly how Queen Margaret feels! She’s unable to walk around her old castle freely. She has to plant her feet where other people want them to be. And all the while she has this pent-up passion of a bull inside her.’

Instantly, I understood the ‘state of “I am”’. All the insecurities that I’d been feeling as the actor in the rehearsal room disappeared. Instead, they were miraculously transformed into amazing fodder for the given circumstances of the character. To prevent any gap opening up between myself and Margaret – to halt that potential San Andreas Fault opening up – we’d synchronised my experiences with the character’s experiences. No longer was Queen Margaret at one remove, with me as the actor trying to feel whatever she might be feeling. Now I really was experiencing what the character might feel. I really was ‘living through’ her given circumstances. In the next rehearsal, everything felt different. I was curiously excited by the staging. We’d unlocked the blocking and it all made perfect sense. In fact, I’d subtly merged with the character.

Merging with the character

When we weave the fabric of our character together with the fabric of our own sensations in rehearsals, we lay the grounds for us to feel as if we’ve merged with the character in performance. It may sound like a paradox, but the closer the weave between ourselves and the character, the greater the potential for us to truly transform. This certainly happened for me playing Margaret in Richard III. There were times during performances when I’d come off stage and I had no idea what I’d done out there. Like an empty flute, I’d temporarily vacated myself, and let the breath and the language and the actions play upon me. It was exhilarating and exciting: I’d merged with Margaret. Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t a question of ‘feeling’ Margaret’s grief for the loss of her murdered son, lover and husband. How could I? Mercifully, I’ve never had anything so dreadful happen to me as having a son, lover or husband murdered. It simply meant that there was no gap between the words of the character and my existence on the stage. I was so driven by everything that we’d prepared in rehearsal, there was no space left in performance into which self-consciousness could creep.

If we can use rehearsals to synchonise our actual moment-by-moment sensations with those of the character, we give ourselves the potential for great flights in performance. We allow every stumble to be part of the dance.

Two Cautionary Tales

I end this chapter with two cautionary tales. Each tale tells a different story of how unaddressed issues in rehearsal eventually led to out-and-out terror in performance. The first is a wonderfully honest account of how isolated we can feel when – for whatever reasons – we can’t connect to our onstage partners. The second is an autobiographical tale of the wonders of working with new writing. I share these two tales as part of our ongoing talking cure as we face and embrace our fear.

Falling into the Pitt

Jay Whittaker was playing the Prime Minister, Mr Pitt, in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III at the Old Globe, San Diego, directed by Adrian Noble. It was a role in which he was really rather brilliant. Yet despite the critical acclaim, he spent the entire four-month run suffering chronic stage fright. When I quizzed him about it a year later, he identified the primary cause of his fear as a sense of isolation in performance:

Real stage fright is where you’re worried you’re gonna fuck something up – and you’re scared! I had that feeling in almost every performance of George. What caused [the stage fright] was that I wasn’t sharing a journey with any other character. The writer hasn’t given William Pitt a particular arc; he’s given him a kind of straight through-line. And there was so much time offstage between scenes that I never really got into a flow. I would do a scene. I’d walk off stage. I’d have time to let all my energy down. And then I’d have to start it all up again. So the entire role ended up being a series of technical manoeuvres. It wasn’t heart; it was completely head. And because it was completely head, I was terrified before every entrance. In every show, I thought I was going to lose my lines. All the way through to the last performance of the four-month run, I would sit or stand backstage before every entrance – going over the lines that I had to say – terrified that I was going to drop them. It was an excruciating show for me, because I had such stage fright.180

If you’d have seen his performance, you’d find this tale hard to believe. And I suspect none of his fellow actors knew. Yet Whit-taker’s stage fright was intensified by the poor predicament of a fellow actor:

One of the other actors had a lot of problems with stage fright of his own, and he would drop lines on a nightly basis and just make the words up. He was terrified. And because we made every entrance of the whole play together, his terror – his stage fright – would infect me. I’d be standing there in the wings and he’d be shaking and mumbling his lines before going on. And that would totally go into me and then I’d feel that way, too. I tried with all my might to just get into my own space and not be affected by it. At the same time, I wanted to be connected to this person, because onstage we needed to be connected. So I was trying to find a fine line between shutting him out when we were offstage and then trying to connect to him when we were onstage. Ultimately what I had to do was just shut him out period. I had to act in my own world and make that a character choice. Mr Pitt was so into his own thing that he didn’t really give a shit about what anybody else thought or said. And I did that, too, out of pure self-preservation.¹⁸¹

Like I said, Whittaker was brilliant as Mr Pitt, and so his choices (albeit out of self-preservation) were absolutely appropriate. But let’s rewind. Let’s go back to the rehearsal room and see what could have been done to prevent this state of anxiety, had the director known anything about it.

One of the surest ways for us to kill the potential for stage fright in performance is to ensure in rehearsals that our partners remain our main point of contact. After all, we are who we are in relation to our environment, and other people are the biggest influence on how our environment changes. And actually that’s exactly what Whittaker wanted to do: to connect to his partner. Yet his fellow actor was a very experienced performer with endless Broadway and international credits. So I’ve no doubt that it would’ve been way too difficult for him to reveal to anyone (director or fellow actors) that he was suffering stage fright. When Derek Jacobi was working with Sir Laurence Olivier in The Merchant of Venice, he describes how: ‘It was during the run that for the first time I became aware of Sir’s stage fright. It filtered through after the play had opened, for naturally he never spoke about it during rehearsals or run-throughs, or on the first night.’182 Of course ‘Sir’ didn’t! It’s a mighty thing to do – to ’fess up to our stage fright. Yet if we don’t, we can feel terribly isolated. And yet if we can focus on our partners – both as empathic people engaged in the same profession and as fictional characters dialoguing in a scene – then we can start to address the situation and alleviate our feelings.

In fact, neuroscientists have examined how we need human contact, especially when we’re in extreme danger (which is absolutely what stage fright can feel like). Combat historian, S.L.A. Marshall, explains that, when soldiers lose visual contact with their buddies under fire, a ‘moral disintegration’ of the line is produced.¹⁸³ Taylor Clark goes on to say that ‘in an emergency, we invariably seek out the company of others to reduce our stress and fear. Immersion in a group makes us feel safer… and the better we know our companions, the greater the comfort we derive… Fear proves no match for the social bonds between us.’184

This can be so useful for us when it comes to stage fright. If we can build a strong ensemble in rehearsals and if we can truly create our characters in relation to each other, we reduce the potential sense of isolation once we’re in performance. By then, we know that there’ll be others out there on the stage with us, who really will help us out if there’s a crisis.

The more we talk about it – which this book constantly advocates – the stronger the bond between us as performers. Then we can acknowledge that our stage fright is a normal part of being an actor and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it’s a boon! As chronic stage-fright sufferer Sara Solovitch reminds us, without that anxiety, ‘there is no excitement, no passion, no peak performance’.¹⁸⁵

*

I want to finish this chapter with a tale of working on new writing and the intricacies of rehearsing it with directors and playwrights. There’s no doubt that the flexibility required of us when a script can change right up to the last moment is very exciting. It can also be absolutely bloody terrifying. Again, in this tale, we found that talking about it as a company – once we realised that we were each experiencing it – dispelled some of that terror. So, on with the talking cure…

Teetering through Topless Mum

Working with new writing is exciting. It’s also very challenging in ways that are quite unlike working on scripts that have stood the test of time. Of course every television or film script is a piece of new writing. And it’s not uncommon for lines to be changed between takes or even for whole scenes to be improvised – and that can really keep us on our creative toes at the time of filming. Of course, at a later date the editor and director will craft the finished product and use our best version. But theatre is different. When it comes to new writing in the theatre, the rehearsal room, rather than the editing suite, becomes the laboratory of intense scrutiny. Will the play work? Does it have longevity? Is the story clear? Are the characters compelling? Is that speech right? Is that line right? Is that word right? Is that comma right? Under this degree of scrutiny, it doesn’t take much for the seeds of our stage fright to sprout, flourish and rampage.

This is the tale of Ron Hutchinson’s Topless Mum, which premiered at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol, 2008. The story focuses on British soldiers faking photographs of Afghan detainees being ‘abused’, ‘humiliated’ and ‘tortured’. While the play hinted at the real-life events of the News of the World newspaper publishing faked Iraqi photos, Hutchinson had added his own personal twist. He proposed that a fictionalised ‘mock-up’ might be potentially more ‘truthful’ than a documentary record. This premise in itself was intriguing.

Both writer and director were extremely charming to work with, so I choose this production simply because it’s an example of extremes. We had an extremely short rehearsal period for a new work. The director and writer were very keen for a London transfer. The writer was abroad for much of the rehearsal period. And the material itself was particularly meaty and challenging. The nature of all these extremes really charged our collective anxiety. And this is how the process unfurled…

The play

Whenever we’re rehearsing a new script, we desperately want it to work – primarily for the playwright. Judi Dench describes how much easier it is to relax with a Shakespeare play because you know it works and you know why it works: ‘In a new play you’re so anxious about telling the author’s story and making it come across.’186 With Topless Mum, the entire creative team really wanted this play to succeed. After all, the script had something meaningful to say in exciting and thought-provoking ways. Added to which, Hutchinson is a sharply intelligent writer with a clear passion for language. He writes very articulate characters, who express themselves fluently. Yet that articulacy was deceptive. While the language of Topless Mum seemed to be very realistic, the speed at which the characters took some big decisions was not psychologically real. And so as actors we had to be mentally very agile. We quickly realised that the play wasn’t as straightforward as it first appeared.

The rehearsals

One of the criteria of a good rehearsal room (as we’ve seen) is that we have to be able to take risks and potentially get things wrong. Yet with a new play, there’s an added complexity to that risk-taking. All the time in rehearsals, the writer and director are trying to hear whether the lines are working and whether they’re telling the story. (Hence, Max Stafford-Clark’s fastidiousness with new scripts.) Meanwhile, as actors, we’re trying to piece together our interpretation of the character. Sometimes, our experimentation can be mistaken by the writer for a case of the lines being clunky, and then they think the words need changing. But half the time they don’t need changing: it’s just that we’re still trying to fathom the appropriate way to interpret them. With Topless Mum, I was nervous about taking risks in case the writer took it as a sign that the play wasn’t working and then rewrote the lines. Added to which, we had such a short rehearsal time for this new and textured play that we found ourselves making decisions about our characters as quickly as we possibly could. This was partly to reassure the writer and director that the play as it stood was strong. And partly so that the lines would be finalised and we could start to get inside the characters’ complex thought processes.

There’s another tricksy little rehearsal challenge with new works. As actors, we have to remain creatively very nimble. Every time a line is rewritten, our character’s thought processes change and their rhythms alter. What might seem like a minor adjustment from the writer’s perspective can feel (from the inside) like a major shift for us. Sometimes a writer will take a line or even a speech from one scene and weave it into another: this can be challenging if we’ve been tracking our character’s through-line. Sometimes lines are taken from one character and given to someone else: this can be tricky if we’ve been justifying our character’s motivations. Sometimes whole speeches or scenes are cut: and this makes us worry that we weren’t doing them properly and the writer and director didn’t like our choices.

You can see how delicate the relationships can be in a rehearsal room when you’re working with new writing. If a character is in constant development, it can be hard for us to trust that the way in which we’re forming our interpretation is logical or right or appropriate. Like I said, we have to remain creatively very nimble – and more than a little thick-skinned.

My nimbleness was certainly put to the test with Topless Mum. At one rehearsal, I mentioned to the writer that he’d given my character an ambiguous final moment. Did he want me to play that ambiguity, or did he want me to bring her journey to a specific conclusion? He thought about it for a moment and then turned to the director. ‘Let’s take a tea break,’ he said. (From the focused look on his face, I guessed he’d gone off to draft a few final lines to round off the character’s story.) Fifteen minutes later, he came back with a complete, new scene. This in itself was very exciting. Nonetheless, it totally changed the trajectory of the character in the overall arc of the play.

With only a matter of days to go before opening night, I was beginning to feel more than a bit shaky. The production was a challenge for me, anyway, as I was still in the aftermath of my stage fright in The Permanent Way. So I had many conflicting feelings about performing in live theatre. Added to which, the rehearsal room at the Tobacco Factory was very, very narrow, so the director was always in our eyeline. And a mild claustrophobia gently cranked up my anxiety about the lines.

Then there was another little challenge. As is usually the case with new works, the writer took time out during the rehearsals, so that the actors and director could get on with it. A few days before opening night – again as is usually the case – the writer returned. And it quickly became clear that we’d been rehearsing the production in a direction that was far more realistic and documentary than he’d anticipated. He imagined (as I understood it) something more epic and Brechtian in its style. Suddenly there was a panic in my stomach. Was I barking up completely the wrong tree? If so, and with the first night looming dangerously close, I hadn’t got time to fix it – and I’d just have to keep on barking!

The performances

The first preview was pretty stressful for the creative team – on both sides of the footlights. One of the actors completely lost his lines during a very long speech and improvised his way meanderingly through the main points. (He simply hadn’t had enough time to bed-in the rewrites.) Added to which, in the traverse performance space, the audience seemed claustrophically close. They were just centimetres away from us on both sides of the stage. So every time I turned my head, I was eyeballing a spectator. (It reminded me horribly of The Permanent Way, when I’d found myself looking an audience member directly in the eye, and my whole epic stage-fright journey had begun.) Added to which, the stakes were high: we all desperately wanted the play to be a success as the writer and the director were so hoping for a London run. Those stakes surreptitiously rattled us, and, in the dressing rooms during the interval, we began to mutter our concerns. One actress sensed that she’d been terribly miscast and was feeling overwhelmingly uncertain about what she was doing out there on the stage. Several other actors were suddenly very vocal about how nervous they were feeling. Given my own history of stage fright – and the fact that I felt unavoidably underprepared for the first preview – I had to work very hard that night to keep a firm focus.

The second preview was no better. Another of the leading actors completely lost his lines and struggled rather painfully to find his way through the scene. Speaking to him afterwards, he shared how ghastly he’d felt. He didn’t yet know the thoughts of the character, as the rehearsal process had been too intensive to get much further than line-bashing the evolving script into his short-term memory. For a brief (misguided) moment in that second preview, he’d allowed himself to flow with his character and, during that brief moment, he’d had a split-second interference of thinking, ‘Oooh, this is going well!’ And – bingo! Self-enthrallment nabbed him! The lines completely eluded him and any possible link in the thought processes vanished into the ether. Struggling to get back on track, he improvised for what seemed like an eternity. But – boy, oh boy – he was out there on his own! Nobody could help him, because nobody else on stage was any more familiar with the play than he was at this early point in the run. The result was that, in the interval, the stage manager came into the dressing rooms and slapped our collective wrists. There was an overwhelming sense that we hadn’t done our homework well enough and we were being badly behaved. This ratcheted up our adrenalin even more and it made me realise that no one but an actor really understands the nature of stage fright. We undergo massive mental multitasking in performance under normal circumstances, let alone with all the complexities of this particular production.

Throughout the month-long run, I put myself under immense scrutiny and the whole experience was decidedly discomforting. For a start, it hadn’t yet dawned on me that I could convert this feeling of insecurity into something appropriate to the character. I hadn’t yet fully understood the nature of ‘experiencing’ and ‘the state of “I am”’. So instead of allowing my real feelings to weave into the fabric of the role, I found myself dislocated from both the play and the character. (‘How can I feel all this nervousness when I’m supposed to be a tough, military lawyer?’)

To make matters worse, the audience still seemed claustrophobically close because of the smallness of the venue as well as the traverse nature of the stage. Often the director was in the house, and halfway through a scene I’d suddenly catch her in my eyeline: her own anxiety for the production was palpable and present. In the end, I wondered whether the talking cure could be useful all round. So I suggested we had a chat. She seemed as grateful as I was to break the amnesty on ‘It’s all right… Isn’t it?’ In fact, during that mid-run interview, she candidly and generously illuminated her own complex process, and sharing our feelings was an immense relief. She confessed that she’d been so engrossed with the minutiae of the language in the rehearsal period, it was only in the performances that she really started to see the whole piece. Because of the traverse stage, she became super-aware of the production’s strengths and weaknesses as she could now watch the audience as much watching as the play.

The audience

With a new play, we have an inevitably heightened awareness of the audience, as we have no idea how the play will be received. It has no performance history yet. No heritage. We’re relying on this very first audience to start creating that history. And the uncertainty is scary. And it’s very difficult. And yet, as Stephen Wangh writes, ‘your task as an actor is to allow yourself to come face to face with whatever is difficult for you, and thereby to transform it.’187 What was difficult for me in this circumstance was the audience! Not to mention my head’s interfering imp – that Fear Voice – which goaded me every night into believing that I was going to forget my lines and humiliate myself in front of all these people! I Had Stage Fright. Simple as that. And in almost every performance of Topless Mum, I felt as if I was tiptoeing on a high wire in an ill-fitting pair of stilettos. And the situation worsened. When we heard that the stage manager had been instructed to give us line notes after each show, the discomfort was magnified. I knew for sure that I was being watched and scrutinised – by the audience, by the director, and by the stage manager. I was doing my best to follow Wangh’s advice: I was certainly ‘coming face to face’ (literally and metaphorically) with what was difficult for me. But how on earth was I going to ‘transform it’?

Being watched is the crux of it all – as we acknowledged at the start of this journey way back in Chapter 1. Wangh even suggests: ‘What we are used to calling stage fright is the energy of feeling watched. In other words, it is the essential energy of performance itself. And it is the same substance whether you call it stage fright or just energy.’¹⁸⁸ It was around the time of Topless Mum that I began to get the inkling that I might write this book. I really wanted to find a way to transform ‘the powerful energy of fear, an energy we usually oppose as an energy, into a creative source.’¹⁸⁹ And then I realised the power of eyes. I’d given away so much agency to the power of the audience’s eyes (those hungry wolves out there in the darkness, those Gestapo interrogators scrutinising me in silence), that I’d forgotten the power of my fellow actors. As film director Mike Nichols once said, ‘If you ever felt you were getting lost, drown in each other’s eyes.’¹⁹⁰ And veteran actor Oliver Ford Davies backs him up, ‘Performance should be a time, with so much rehearsed and decided, that you really can lose yourself in your fellow actors.’¹⁹¹ Part of the problem was that, with our all-too-brief rehearsal process for Topless Mum, so much hadn’t been rehearsed, so much hadn’t been decided, and I’d simply forgotten to lose myself in my partner’s eyes.

The actors

I started talking to my fellow actors about our collective energy. One of the leading actresses revealed how vulnerable she was feeling – on the traverse stage, with the large textual arias that could sometimes sound more like the author than the character. Like Nina in The Seagull, she didn’t know what to do with her hands. She wobbled on her high heels. Her legs felt too long. Her hands felt too big: she was (in effect) a ‘helpless witness to her own malfunctioning’.192

Hearing that she was experiencing so much discomfort was – strange as it may sound – wonderful! We both realised that, as a result of sharing our personal vulnerabilities, we could now work onstage as a real team. We could really drown in each other’s eyes. We could provide strong listening. We could connect and support each other – because now we knew what each other was going through. We could do the very thing that Jay Whittaker (as Mr Pitt) couldn’t do with his fellow actor. As Wangh stresses, ‘the surprising thing about fear is that if we acknowledge it and put it into the work, it disappears, or rather it seems to convert itself directly into excitement.’¹⁹³ (Like that genie in a puff of green smoke.) However, as Wangh also points out, ‘it will not serve to try to make the fear disappear. It disappears in the process of naming it, of letting yourself know, “Okay, this is fear.” It takes real courage to say, “I am afraid,” so in the act of naming it you are already converting the fear into usable energy.’ That’s what we were doing: we were naming it out loud, and in so doing we were converting it into usable energy. Just as had happened with The Permanent Way, sharing the experience of Topless Mum enabled us actors to consolidate our fears and reconfigure our processes. From that moment on, we actually started to enjoy ourselves and the words began to flow. We even felt comfortable on stage. There was a twinkle in each other’s eyes. And suddenly we were no longer the ones feeling naked in Topless Mum. Our vulnerability was willing and no longer out of our control. Furthermore, the writer and director secured the London run. It was a happy ending all round!

Overview

In this chapter, we’ve put under the microscope the all-important actor-director relationship. We’ve looked at what we need from a director and from a healthy rehearsal environment (including trust and playfulness), whilst also acknowledging the power-play and the necessary distancing. We’ve examined the unique nature of previews. We’ve looked at what can happen in performance as the result of glitches incubated in the rehearsal room. We’ve touched upon the principles of rehearsing, including developing strong listening and recalibrating what it means to act and ‘become’ the character (using Stanislavsky’s tools of perezhivanie and ‘the state of “I am”’). We’ve reminded ourselves of the power of our partners, especially when handling our collective fears and especially when working on new writing.

*

In response to her own stage fright – which (as we’ve seen) crippled her during the one-woman show, Rose, at the National Theatre in 2000 and sent her scurrying mid-sentence off to her dressing room – Olympia Dukakis picked herself back up and walked back out onto the stage to tumultuous applause. Fear is ‘just all part of the work,’ she said. ‘We’re confronted constantly with new experiences, new experiences that shake us up: If you deny that, it’s going to catch up with you.’194 As we know, this whole book is about not denying our fear so that it doesn’t catch up with us. Through the course of the last three chapters, we’ve acknowledged the roles of the audience, the brain and the director. Now let’s turn our attention to what we ourselves can individually do as actors. How can we till the most fertile grounds for the fruits of our artistic pleasure to grow? How can we be kind enough on ourselves to face the fear, to welcome it, and to diffuse its pernicious hold? Once more unto the breach, dear friends…