5. How Do We Develop Good Practices?

What can we control?

We started Chapter 1 with the image of the generals going into battle. We know our ultimate goal is to face and embrace our Fear Foe, rather than fight it. That said, one of the main strategies of war is to take control – of supplies, routes, landmasses, not to mention the hearts and minds of those to be conquered. If we know that we can control a situation, we feel a certain ease.

When it comes to the acting industry, however, there are so many aspects that are out of our control, it’s not surprising that our fears ratchet up. Our whole life is built on uncertainty. Never quite knowing if our agent will call. And if they do, will we get the audition? And if they don’t, can we pay the bills? And if we can’t, will we lose our homes? And if we lose, will we survive? And on and on the fears conspire. Yet we needn’t be adrift on the sea of our tempestuous industry. As Beth Klein, Senior Vice President of Talent and Casting at Universal Television, advises, we should forget about what we can’t control and focus instead on what we can. So what can we control? Our ‘preparation’ and ‘good choices’ are two sound and simple places to start, suggests Klein.¹⁹⁶ So in this chapter, we’ll look at how we can control those two very things.

We begin with our basic acting instrument, and how to be physically and psychophysically prepared. (These instructions are fairly obvious, but it’s still worth including them here.) Then we turn to the craft of acting itself, and look at it from four perspectives. First of all, how we can prepare ourselves in general for our creative work. Second, how we can guard against stage fright at the rehearsal level. Third, how we can tackle stage fright in performance. And fourth, how we can maintain our creativity in the long term. Then we consider what it really means to face the fear rather than fight it. And we finish off with best practices for dealing with auditions and post-performance practices. By the end, we should’ve equipped ourselves with some fairly comprehensive strategies for dealing with those stage-fright demons, whenever they choose to appear. After all, in the art of war: ‘Invincibility depends on one’s self.’197

So let’s start our tactics for invincibility by preparing the instrument we use for our creative work: our body.

Tending to the Physical Needs of Our Instrument

There are certain obvious things that our body needs if we’re to maintain our well-being in everyday life, let alone when we’re dealing with the stresses of an actor’s lifestyle. Obviously we need enough sleep, we need sufficient exercise, and we need good nutrition.¹⁹⁸ Fortunately it’s more or less in our control to make sure those three things can happen.

At the same time, there are several, equally obvious, things that we should avoid, including caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and recreational drugs. It’s even more in our control to deal with these avoidances, especially if we’re suffering stage fright: to put it bluntly, it’s up to us whether or not we put them into our mouth. And it’s important to understand the impact on our system if we do choose to consume them. The affect of caffeine is very much like the affect of adrenalin, so if we’re already excitable, the last thing we want is more adrenalin. The same goes for alcohol, nicotine, and recreational drugs. They all affect the chemical balance of our brain. When our brain works right – we work right. And when our brain is troubled – it’s hard to be our best self.199

In fact, when we’re suffering ongoing stage fright, we can find ourselves in something of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Which came first – the stage fright or the stressed brain? So whatever we can do consciously to be kind to our brain – be it more sleep and exercise, less alcohol and coffee, more nuts and leafy greens, less high-fat meat and sugar – the more we can exponentially reduce our stage fright. These are good practices that we can easily adopt to prepare our physical instrument and control our stress. And it’s pretty much up to us whether or not we do them. Yet we know that stage fright isn’t just physical – it’s psychophysical. So we should also look at our psychophysical needs.

Tending to the Psychophysical Needs of Our Instrument

Every musician know that the less tension in the player, the more freedom in the playing. And the same is true for us as actors: it’s much easier to be creative if we’re feeling physically relaxed. Similarly, every potter knows that the clay must be on the centre of the wheel if the pot is to be easily shaped. And again the same is true for us as actors: it’s much easier to be creative if we’re feeling centred (i.e. focused or concentrated). In fact, Antony Sher refers to the concentration-relaxation balance as the ‘ideal state’ for actors.²⁰⁰ So, when we’re preparing our creative instrument, the balance between the two – feeling relaxed and feeling focused – is our main psychophysical need. We’ve already seen that Relaxation and Attention (or Focus or Concentration) are the first two of the four pillars on which Stanislavsky built his ‘system’ (along with Observation and Imagination). And since our Relaxation helps with our Attention, we’ll start with that pillar first.

Relaxation operates on two levels: there’s our Small-picture Relaxation (i.e. the particular state we achieve as actors before a rehearsal, shoot or show) and there’s our Big-picture Relaxation (i.e. the ongoing state we achieve as human beings that affects our whole lives). Let’s start with the Big Picture. In fact, let’s start at the very beginning – with breath.

Breathing

When I was a kid doing school productions, my mum would tell me to stand in the wings, breathe deeply in and out three times, and say to myself, ‘Keep calm… Keep calm… Keep calm…’ And it worked! I just thought it was a family ritual; little did I realise it was a biological strategy. Well, of course – my mother was a biology teacher. Not only did she know that it was a good strategy for immediately distracting my thoughts from my nerves and giving me something very concrete to focus on, she also understood that developing a good connection to our breath is vital for us when it comes to reducing our fear. This is a fact that even combat trainers put into practice. They encourage their students to use what they call ‘tactical breathing’ – and it’s just as useful for us actors as it is for soldiers. Tactical breathing is simple: ‘breathe slowly and deeply into your abdomen (not your chest) for four counts, hold for four counts, exhale for four counts, and repeat. Our breath… is like a bridge to the parasympathetic nervous system, which [as we saw in Chapter 1] is in charge of calming the body down. By slowing the breath, we send a subtle message to the unconscious mind that everything is going to be okay.’²⁰¹ (This is exactly what my mother was teaching me in my nascent performing years.)

Part of the reason that tactical breathing is so vital is that, often when we’re anxious, we inadvertently start to breathe shallowly and quickly. This increases our susceptibility to fear, as our inadvertent gasping sends the stress-message to our body that something is wrong. Because there’s such a direct connection between our breath and our parasympathetic nervous system, the research on anxiety suggests that ‘if you keep your breathing under control, it will be impossible for you to experience the strong physiological symptoms of performance anxiety.’202 This is extremely useful for us to know. Our breathing is something we can actively and consciously control (in the wings, in our trailer, wherever). In other words, we have the direct and simple means to actively and consciously begin to control our anxiety. (If only I’d remembered what my mother had taught me as a child, when I was suffering my own adult stage fright.)

Linked to our breathing, we have some other Big-picture Relaxation Practices that can help us train our control. They’re useful both for life and for acting – and they include meditation and yoga.

Meditation

At the heart of our stage fright (as we’ve seen throughout this book) is often our perversely self-sabotaging, inner Fear Voice insisting, ‘I can’t do this! I’m going to screw it up!’ When this voice starts chattering, it’s really just our imagination at perverse play – and our imagination can be a very powerful force. And yet it’s a force that’s remarkably at our beck and call, so we can choose to use it just as easily for therapeutic ends as we can for destructive ones. This is where meditation comes in.

The basic principle of meditation is that we take direct responsibility for our inner monologues. We reprogramme how we talk to ourselves. So instead of envisioning the future as full of anxiety (‘Oh, no! I’m going to screw up!’), we choose to see it as full of optimism (‘Oh, yes! This is going to be fun!’). Again, science has proven that people who practise meditation are able to calm their brains more quickly than those who don’t. Of course it takes discipline and practice. And it links back to the second of Stanislavsky’s pillars: Attention (or Focus or Concentration). So now let’s turn to that pillar.

We all have minds that swing quickly from one thought to another like a monkey through the jungle. (From the scene that we’re performing – to our tax bill – to our audition next week – to the line we just stumbled over – to the doom of our acting destiny. All in a matter of seconds.) If we practise meditation regularly – by concentrating our thoughts – we can train ourselves to focus our monkey-mind and stabilise our attention, so that we can have a little more control over where it swings to next. Obviously it’s nigh on impossible to discard our interfering thoughts entirely. In fact, many meditation (or ‘mindfulness’) practitioners say that the interfering thoughts are the equivalent of the weights in a gym: we need them there in order to strengthen our ability to work against them. Or, to put it another way, they are the grit that makes the pearl in the oyster. The trick (in simple terms) is to acknowledge that those negative thoughts are there, but not to give them any value or precedence. Instead, we just observe them. And the rewards are twofold. On the one hand, meditation trains us to let go of our distracting (self-sabotaging) thoughts much faster than we would otherwise. And on the other hand, it quickens our ability to refocus on the fun of performing. So there’s a double-whammy diffusion of our stage fright.

The handy thing is that our mind doesn’t have to do all this focus work on its own. Since our body is way more biddable than our mind alone, we can increase our level of self-control by harnessing our body’s energy to our mind’s meditative practice. Small wonder that so many actors practise some form of yoga.

Yoga

The word ‘yoga’ means ‘yoking’ – and yoga directly yokes our physical body to our mindful awareness. As we saw with tactical breathing, when we consciously use our breath in particular patterns, we can relax our muscles. And when our muscles are relaxed, we can be much more mentally present to what’s happening here and now. What that means when we’re acting is that we’re far more available to our intuitive responses and our in-the-moment impulses. And then, as we know, our acting feels much more alive. We’re making new discoveries here and now, rather than fixing a ‘perfect’ performance. Besides, yoga is great for our overall physical suppleness and mental agility.

Because yoga integrates our body, mind and breath, it’s a wonderful means of handling and overcoming stage fright. This is no new practice in the theatre. In fact, yoga has been a significant part of Western actor-training for over a hundred years and for many, many centuries in the East. Stanislavsky actually used it in the Moscow Art Theatre (although he had to keep it well under the radar of the materialist Soviet government, as it was way too esoteric for them). When you consider that he was creating his ‘system’ while he was suffering a crisis in his own acting – as well as dealing with chronic stage fright – it makes perfect sense for yoga to be one of the tools in his kit. Now more and more practitioners and actor-trainers across the globe are using yoga as part of their Big-picture Relaxation Practices. So it’s not merely a fad of the last twenty years.

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Those are a few examples of how we can prepare and maintain our instruments physically and psychophysically on an ongoing basis. They can also help us with some of the external factors of our industry that we saw in Chapter 1 (such as loss of control over our careers and the vagaries of casting). In other words, balancing our body and mind can be a great (inner) antidote to the madness of the (outside) world.

Now let’s turn our attention to some Small-picture Relaxation Practices that we can use when we’re preparing for our creative work as actors.

Preparing Ourselves for Our Creative Work

Before offering some specific practices for working on a role, I’m going to propose some basic guiding principles for our acting in general. As ever, these guiding principles are as much about mindset as anything else – and they can help us remain relaxed enough to handle our performance anxiety in both rehearsal and performance. These three guiding principles are: (1) keep it simple; (2) get out of our own way; and (3) know what we need to warm ourselves up. Let’s look at what each of these means.

Guiding principle 1: keep it simple

Keep it simple means just that! Sometimes we’re so desperate to transform ourselves into a character, we try to be too clever. We overcomplicate our choices in rehearsal – coming up with all sorts of smart ideas and clever constructs. And then in performance we want to be sure that the audience ‘gets’ all those ideas and acknowledges how smart we’ve been. Our clever construct then becomes like a suit of armour. Not only is it metaphorically hard to move in, but it also grows metaphorically rusty. As we stagger about in our rusty armour, there’s a risk – in the words of director Ingemar Lindh – ‘of not giving space to what exists’.203 What actually exists is our live connection: with our partner, with the space, with the given circumstances of the script, and with the audience. It’s the life of that in-the-moment core self that we talked about in Chapter 1. If we can dare to not have everything worked out in advance, we can genuinely follow new impulses as they arise. In fact, there’s actually less to worry about… because there’s actually less to remember. We’re simply allowing ourselves to listen to the here and now. And that’s way more pleasurable than stomping around in our rusty armour.

It’s one of the curious paradoxes of acting: the less we feel we have to give a fixed and perfect performance, the less nervous we are. When we’re less nervous, we can be more playful. When we’re more playful, we can dynamically listen to each other. When we dynamically listen, we can respond to each moment as it unfurls. Which takes us to guiding principle 2…

Guiding principle 2: get out of our own way

The degree of dynamic listening that we’re talking about here is really all about getting out of our own way. The image I usually use to describe the ideal state for an actor in performance is that of a flute. A flute is well constructed and well maintained – but it’s empty. If we’ve done our preparation on a role and we’re feeling physically relaxed and mentally focused, we can almost vacate ourselves in performance like a flute. (It’s what I described in Chapter 4 with Queen Margaret in Richard III.) We don’t have to think about all our preparation; instead we can trust that we’ve assimilated it. And then we can simply let the music of the playwright’s script sound through us as we speak it, playing its notes on our body, on our imagination, our emotions and our soul. And then the notion of stage fright doesn’t even dawn on us.

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Ultimately these two guiding principles help us to be in (what Stanislavsky calls) a ‘constant state of inner improvisation’. If we really want to exist in this wonderfully liberating and exciting state – this fine balance between preparing ourselves thoroughly and daring to let it all go – we need our third guiding principle. We need to warm ourselves up effectively.

Guiding principle 3: warm ourselves up

Every actor has a different way of warming up – and part of our good-practice preparation is to understand what we each personally need. After all, a tailor-made warm-up can help us enormously in dealing with our stage fright. It may be vocal. It may be physical. It may be quiet like a meditation – or vigorous like a child at play. The main thing is that a warm-up shouldn’t feel like a chore. Rather, it’s ‘a gift you’re giving to yourself and to your co-workers,’ describes Stephen Wangh. ‘It is a gift you choose to help you grow as actors. It can provide both safety and excitement.’204 Safety – in the same way that scales and arpeggios provide a musician with a structure that can be rehearsed and refined. Excitement – in the same way that those scales and arpeggios prepare the player for flights of musical majesty. In other words, we don’t just warm up for the sake of warming up. We’re getting ready to propel ourselves into vast and imaginative realms.

It’s also a conscious means of transforming the state that we’re in when we arrive at the theatre or the film location. A warm-up, as Wangh puts it, ‘is a bridge between the conditions of mind, body and voice you have been using in everyday life and the conditions of mind, body and voice you need to act.’ Whether it involves the whole company or it’s a solitary activity, a warm-up helps us transit from the distracting detritus of our daily life to the seductive anticipation of the performance space.

That said, some actors don’t do any warm-up at all – perhaps because their whole existence is one big creative warm-up so they’re always in tune. Others begin the whole process hours before the performance time. Some actors adapt their warm-ups according to the character they’re playing, as different roles require us to get into different rhythms and headspaces. And sometimes we need to change our warm-up, because we ourselves have changed. After my stage-fright experience in The Permanent Way, fellow actor Matthew Dunster pointed out that my warm-up (a highly structured combination of physical and vocal exercises) might actually be adding to my stage fright, rather than diffusing it:

The warm-up you currently do is very detailed and it’s basically about repetition. It’s very routine – which is what our performances have become at the moment. So when our routine is broken in performance – like when we forget our lines – we’re not equipped to deal with it; we have nothing to save us. What you need to do is scare yourself witless. If I was working with you as a director, I’d make you do a warm-up that was different every night – because, when that repetition deserts you in performance, you’re fucked if you haven’t got the facility for playing about.205

What Dunster is saying is crucial in terms of understanding that a warm-up should be adaptable. Like a cyclist training at high altitude or a gymnast training during a Russian winter, a warm-up needs to be fit for purpose, and – if it’s not – we need to change it. At the end of the day, we’re trying to prepare our inner creative state so that we can achieve the ideal balance between relaxation and focus.

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So far, we’ve looked at the Big Picture of our whole lives and the Small Picture of our general acting work. Let’s make the circle of attention smaller. Let’s look at how to prepare ourselves for working on a particular role. First, we’ll look at some good rehearsal practices, and then turn our attention to some good performance practices.

Developing Good Rehearsal Practices

Whatever happens during rehearsals (as we saw in Chapter 4) can sow the seeds of our confidence or (conversely) our fright. Yet we also know that we’re not entirely at our director’s mercy. We have plenty of strategies that we can adopt on our own to keep the fears at bay. Going back to Beth Klein’s idea of the things we can control – i.e. ‘preparation’ and ‘good choices’ – the rehearsal practices I offer here are intended for that very purpose. They’re designed to help us feel more prepared – practically and philosophically – so that we can make good choices when we’re working on a role. And the starting point for our rehearsal preparation is pretty much always the text.

Rehearsal practice 1: mining the text

Before we can begin to make any creative choices, we have to know the territory that we’re entering: i.e. we have to analyse the script. The term ‘text analysis’ can sound academic and boring; but when we embark on proper text analysis, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some directors, including Adrian Noble, call it mining the text, so that we can excavate the real gems. The whole process of fathoming everything out is an intricate and fascinating forensic science. (Why does a character use certain words? Why are there certain silences? Why did the writer choose particular punctuation? Why are certain activities specified or certain points of view adopted?) The forensic investigation is filled with possibility. In fact, putting together a skeleton from the tiny shards of paper-and-ink bone – and cladding that skeleton in our own flesh and muscles – is one of the greatest thrills of acting. And just like any other aspect of our craft, real and thorough text analysis is physical and psychological.

Physical text analysis

On the physical side, the clues are often not hard to find, as the writer may be explicit about the character’s physicality. We know Richard III has a hump; we know Epikhodov in The Cherry Orchard has squeaky shoes; we know Walter White in Breaking Bad has cancer; we know Susy Hendrix in Wait Until Dark is blind. And once we’ve gleaned the hard facts, we can start to use our imagination to embellish the other physical details. A really good provocation for our physical text analysis is: what’s the character’s occupation? If we’re playing Joan of Arc, we know that she’s a soldier; Walter White is a chemistry teacher; Friar Lawrence is a Friar – and the Nurse is a nurse! If we can pinpoint a character’s occupation, we can come up with all sorts of imaginings about how they might walk, how they might use their hands (do they cut down trees or do they mend intricate clockwork?), how flexible or otherwise their body is, how musical or otherwise their voice is. And, to some extent, these physical details aren’t too hard to fathom.

But our forensic research can take us deeper. There are less obvious and more intricate physical clues embedded in the text. For example: what are the character’s rhythmic patterns? Are their sentences long? Are the rhythms staccato? Do they talk in iambic pentameter? And it’s important to uncover these rhythms, as they’ll actively affect our breathing. Then there are other equally physical and yet even subtler clues, such as: what’s the shape of the vowels in our mouth? What’s the bounce of our tongue and teeth around the consonants? And how does it actually feel when we say the words? These tiny physical sensations can vividly fuel our imagination. Take Shakespeare’s line from King Lear: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!’ There’s a range of vowel sounds here and a vastness in the images. And then take Mamet’s line from American Buffalo: ‘Fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie.’ There’s a joy in the rhythmic consonants, and there’s a pleasure in the expressiveness of the character’s inarticulate repetitions. Verbal and oral clues like these – and the feel of them around the resonators of our face – can provide our imagination with just as many stimuli as the images themselves. So the physical choices available to us when we really dig into the text analysis are both obvious and embedded – visual and sensory. And the discoveries can be very rewarding.

Psychological text analysis

On the psychological side, we’re looking in our text analysis for the intentions beneath the words. Language is one of the main ways as human beings that we let the world know the nuances of all our feelings, our needs, our beliefs and desires. If we didn’t convert our inner experiences into language, no one would have much of a clue about our perspective on the world. It’s exactly the same with scripted characters. Their external words are clues to their internal lives. Yet (whether we’re talking about real people or fictional characters), those feelings, needs, beliefs and desires can be very hard for us to pin down to concrete expressions. Because what we actually say and what we actually mean can’t be always be laid on top of each other as exact carbon copies. After all, sometimes we simply don’t know how to express ourselves. Our words might be just the tip of an ‘iceberg’ of emotions that lies hidden beneath the surface of our external expression. A brushed off ‘Sure, I’m fine,’ after my grandmother just died doesn’t really mean that I’m fine. ‘Sure, I’m fine’ could really mean, ‘Please don’t talk to me right now – or I’ll fall to pieces…’ So our real craft as actors is to hold the human soul up to the light like a quartz crystal, to twist it and to reveal the subtle nuances of the character’s (and the writer’s) myriad intentions. And in this way the forensic process of text analysis becomes very exciting – and very playful.

Psychophysical text analysis

And it doesn’t stop there. Beyond the physical and the psychological, text analysis also has a psychophysical side. Many actors find that breaking down a script into its ‘bits of action’ (or units) is an extremely useful way of getting inside the text. (Tanya Moodie illustrated this in Chapter 3, with her vivid description of pencil lines and coloured highlighters. And, personally, I don’t know how to go about learning a script unless I’ve done this kind of analysis.) What we do when we break a script into its bits of action is to subtly combine the physical structure of a scene with the psychological intentions of the characters. If we can see how a piece is structured (how long a scene is, how many characters exit and enter, the number of monologues or soliloquies or overlaps, etc.), we can unpack two lines of enquiry at the same time. We can trace the various changes that happen in each character’s thoughts (i.e. the specifics of the scene) and at the same time, we can chart the overall dramatic tension of a scene (i.e. its general shape). Lots of books detail how to do this prep (not least my own The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit),²⁰⁶ so I’m not going to go into that here. Instead, I want to highlight why this kind of text analysis can directly allay our stage fright.

When we break down a text into its bits of action, what we’re basically doing is ‘bundling’ sections of text together. Bundling information, stresses psychologist Sian Beilock, can be very beneficial when we’re performing under pressure: ‘Combining what you need to remember into meaningful wholes helps to ensure that some pieces don’t get lost when it counts the most.’²⁰⁷ This is exactly what breaking down a text into its bits of action does: it unlocks the scene’s structure, it reveals its emotional and narrative arc, and it bundles information together into meaningful wholes. Rather than having a whole heap of individual items strung together on a string of our short-term memory – or one big blob of text that we’re trying to line-cram – we now have globules of connected ideas that we can pattern and link. Dividing our lines into ‘bundles’ (so to speak) makes them much easier to remember. And if this kind of ‘bits of action’ text analysis isn’t a process that our director brings overtly into the rehearsal room, it’s something we can do on our own.

So text analysis is physical, psychological, psychophysical, and we can do it on our own. In other words, it’s a great rehearsal practice that gives us some control over our creative preparation and enables us to make some good choices. Thus it’s one way to allay our fears. It also helps us to become more precise in our learning of a text. After all, being dead-letter-perfect is another very powerful way for us to take control of our preparation and overcome our stage fright. Which takes us to rehearsal practice 2…

Rehearsal practice 2: being dead-letter-perfect

Words are more important than we can possibly imagine. Very subtle information is carried in the nuances of language. And that subtle information can cue certain responses within us. It’s the premise on which most advertising and newscasting and political campaigning is based. Look at the public outcry in Summer 2015 when Prime Minister David Cameron referred to a ‘swarm’ of people migrating from France to the UK. And as I currently sit here writing, Donald Trump is running for Republican candidacy in the USA. Every day, words are being bandied about and subsequently justified.

When we really tune into the subtleties of language – and the surreptitious way that information cues our responses – we realise just how important it is to know our lines reliably. Not only because of how our words affect other people, but also how they affect us – not least in terms of staving off our stage fright. So it pays to be dead-letter-perfect. Here’s what I mean…

Take the word piano. An experiment was conducted, in which one group of people was given the sentence, ‘The man tuned the piano,’ and another group was given the sentence, ‘The man lifted the piano.’ Later, both groups were asked to name objects associated with the phrases, ‘Something heavy’ and ‘Something melodious’. The group who’d been given the ‘tuning’ image offered ‘piano’ in response to ‘something melodious’. The other, ‘lifting’ group, offered ‘piano’ in response to ‘something heavy’.208 This was because each group had encoded the same object – a piano – with a specific image: one involving pleasant music, the other involving physical exertion. When we encode information – be it a piano or a poem – the whole process is as emotional as it is literal. In other words, we associate feelings to what we’re learning as much as we associate literal meaning. So the idea of listening to a melodious piano concerto conjures up inside us a completely different emotional resonance from the idea of trying to haul a heavy piano up a set of stairs – like the chimps in the old PG Tips commercial! So it’s important that we learn a script dead-letter-perfect right from the beginning – rather than learning our own paraphrased version of it. Otherwise we start to forge different imaginative and emotional associations from those that will ultimately help us to remember the script-as-writ. When this happens, our interpretation of the role is always a little bit ‘off’ – a bit too generalised. And that can add low-level anxiety, because we know we’re slightly off-key.

Which leads to another reason for us to develop the rehearsal practice of being dead-letter-perfect. When we’re not ‘DLP’, there’s always a little distracted part of our brain occupied with thinking, ‘That’s kinda-sorta what the text is… Not quite that word, but nearly…’ And that little distraction can act like a niggling worm of doubt. It nibbles away as a mild interference. What’s more, we end up asking too much of our brain. Instead of just getting on with connecting to the actual script, we’re trying to improvise a new script on the spot, creating our slightly ‘off’ version of what the playwright gave us. And that’s a completely different task in its own right. After all, we’re trained actors, not professional writers. Besides, just imagine what would happen if everyone in the cast did that: you’d end up with a script which was nothing like the writer’s original. At the end of the day, it’s simply much easier to know the lines exactly, rather than a ‘kinda-sorta’ paraphrase. And not just for our own sake – but also for our partners – so that we can help them with (what’s known as) their cued recall. Which takes us to rehearsal practice 3…

Rehearsal practice 3: understanding the processes of cued recall

This is another compelling reason why we should learn a script dead-letter-perfect. It goes back to how our brain works and the network of neuronal patterns that fire when we remember something. We’ve seen several times throughout this book that, neurologically, there’s a very clear match between what we’ve encoded in our brain (i.e. learnt) and what we’re trying to retrieve (i.e. remember). So when our brain can’t make that match, we’re in trouble. Here’s an example…

Have you ever forgotten a line on stage and the other actors just look at you completely blankly? It’s like everybody has suddenly forgotten the whole script. That’s because there’s a lack of what’s known as cued recall. The other actors haven’t detected a match between the cue that they were expecting you to give them (i.e. the cue in the script that would trigger their memory) and the words (or silence) that you’ve just uttered. Here – as ever – art is imitating everyday life. Here’s how…

In everyday life, certain cues trigger certain recollections for us. For example, if I ask you: ‘What did you do on Friday night?’ it’ll trigger different responses in you from if I ask, ‘Where did you go on Friday night after you left the movies?’ The first cue is fairly open. The second cue provides us ‘with more information in an effort to extract some specific material.’209 (Police and prosecuting lawyers use this strategy all the time: ‘So what did you do after you left the casino and went to the victim’s apartment?’ – I was never at the victim’s apartment, but now you’re making me think that I might have been…) In other words, we can manipulate someone else’s recall by using particular cues. If we’re performing a script and the match between the words and the cues doesn’t happen, it can lead to all sorts of inner mayhem. And not just in theatre.

There’s an increasing tendency in film and television today for actors to deliberately adjust the lines – as if that little frisson of improvisation will make their performances seem more ‘truthful’. I recently heard about a very successful actor who was filming a TV series. He was frustrated at how many of the other actors didn’t bother learning the scriptwriter’s lines. They didn’t want to rehearse, and they weren’t giving him the cue lines, and it was really screwing the performance which, as the series lead, he’d carefully and conscientiously crafted. During a shoot, he’d be expecting to hear a particular line, and, if some other cue were thrown his way instead, there’d be a split-second adjustment in his head as he tried to figure whether or not his own scripted line would still fit the dialogue. In the end, he went to the producers and asked for a gentle riot act to be read. How could they collectively serve the script or the narrative of the drama if several actors were giving their own rendition, rather than the one agreed upon?

When there’s a constant lack of cued recall, we’re not being given the necessary triggers to retrieve our lines effectively. And more often than not, our memory will fail us if what’s being cued is different from what we’ve encoded. Or to put it another way: we’re less likely to remember the right line if our partner doesn’t give us the right cue. And vice versa. Acting is collaborative, after all; so we need to help our partners out, too.

However, there’s another rehearsal practice that we can adopt to be sure we’ve prepared ourselves as thoroughly as we can – regardless of the cues that our partners end up giving us. And that’s to personalise the images.

Rehearsal practice 4: personalising the images

One of the ways in which we can help ourselves to effectively encode new information (i.e. learn the lines) so that we can reliably retrieve the stored information (i.e. remember the lines) is to personalise the images in the script. (This is a valuable rehearsal practice that stops us getting anxious if our partners don’t give us the right cues.) Let’s go back to the word piano. When we see that word in the script, we can personalise the image by giving it as much detail as possible. What kind of piano are we picturing? Is it our brother’s polished Steinway grand? Or our nephew’s dusty Casio keyboard? Or the out-of-tune piano in the village hall where we once learnt Beginner’s Ballet? The more refined we make our images – i.e. the more we personalise them – the more specific will be the feelings we attach to those words, and, therefore, the more consolidated our memory of those words will be.

Now let’s go back to the hammer that we talked about in Chapter 3. As we imagine picking up the hammer, we’ve probably got enough history with hammers to know how to assess its weight and we’ll probably know how to bang something with it. We might recall the little wooden mallet we had as a kid for bonking round pegs into round holes as our tiny self discovered its amazing powers of coordination. Let’s now suppose we’re playing the farm manager Shamrayev in The Seagull: suddenly that hammer will have a heap of other connotations for a man who works on a farm, who mends fences and shoes horses. What kind of hammer do we picture now?

Let’s now put an imaginary axe on the table. How is the axe different from the hammer? And are we the woodcutter in Little Red Riding Hood, killing the wolf and saving the granny? Or are we the student Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, bashing out the brains of a little old lady? At that moment of imagination, our brain is remembering the weight, the length, the metal and wood of some axe from our past when perhaps we went on a camping trip and chopped up firewood. At the same time, we’re creating an imaginative understanding of what exactly our body would have to do to chop down a tree or kill a wolf or bash out a little old lady’s brains. With each of those images comes a particular emotional stirring – and our association with the axe will be different from our association with the hammer. So you can see that personalising the images (which goes hand in hand with the precision of being dead-letter-perfect) is key to consolidating our lines so that we can retrieve them easily. And when we can retrieve our lines easily, we don’t get so nervous. It’s an invaluable rehearsal practice. Again it’s something we can do on our own, and again it’s playful and exciting.

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So there’s quite a lot of practical text analysis we can do during rehearsals to prepare ourselves independently and take control of our choices. We can find the physical feel of the text, the psychological undercurrents, and the psychophysical bits of action. We can make sure we’re dead-letter-perfect so that we can help our partners with their cued recall, and we can help ourselves to be dead-letter-perfect by personalising the images.

That said – however thoroughly we prepare ourselves on our own – there’s always that moment in rehearsals when we share this work for the first time and still the jitters can hit us. A very good rehearsal strategy for dealing with our nerves is to actually celebrate the opportunity to practise under stress.

Rehearsal practice 5: practising under stress

The first time we go public with something that we’ve been preparing behind closed doors can be more than a little stressful. How often have we said (or heard fellow actors say), ‘I don’t know why I’m screwing this up – I did it brilliantly in my room last night’? It’s actually perfectly normal. The room in which we prepped the material last night was probably quite different from the space in which we’re sharing our prep today. All this new information bombarding our senses (a new space, new people, different props, cameras, etc.) can inevitably screw us up temporarily. And the reason for this – as scientific studies have shown – is that our memory is more reliable if we’re in a similar physical environment and emotional state at the time we remember something, as we were at the time we first learnt it. It’s what psychologist Endel Tulving calls the encoding specificity principle.210 He suggests that what we remember depends on the similarity – i.e. the ‘match’ – between the two environments (the learning environment and the retrieving environment). So the more alike they are, the better.

And the match is twofold. On the one hand, the physical contexts need to be the same – and we all know how much easier it is to perform something in a space in which we’ve already learned and rehearsed it. On the other hand, the psychological state needs to be the same – so that we’re remembering our lines in the same kind of state we were in when we were rehearsing them.

It’s not always easy to find a match, though. In terms of physical context, we’ve no idea necessarily what the film set will look like until we’re there – or what our costume will be. Even with something as simple as a first readthrough of a script, we can feel vulnerable – all these people we’ve never met before, in a room that’s new to us – and we’re trying to show them why we were chosen for the role over any other actor.

As for the psychological state – it’s often even harder to find a match. All the comfort of rehearsing our audition speech in our bedroom flies out of the window when our heart is pounding and the adrenalin is pumping in front of a panel of judges.

However… all these mis-matches can also be accepted as useful fodder here-today-now, and turned on their head to our creative advantage. If we allow even the mild stress of a readthrough to be a constructive part of our experience, we can ultimately reduce our chances of suffering stage fright when we find ourselves under greater pressure at a later time. How so?

Because practising under stress can actually change the hardwiring of our brain so that it can learn to stay cool under any condition. People in physically dangerous jobs do it all the time. Soldiers and firemen regularly practise their drill: they know that rehearsing under stress is as important for them as any kind of rehearsing is for actors. So whenever we find ourselves feeling anxious in a rehearsal (‘Will the director like this idea? Am I working well with my scene partner? Will I hit my mark?’), we should actually embrace and enjoy these feelings. After all, they’re helping us to train our brain to deal with the higher octane situations of previews and press nights and final takes.

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So those are five easily implemented rehearsal practices. They are very much in our control and we can use them to prepare ourselves so that we can make some bold choices. So let’s now fast-forward to performance. What good practices can we put in place there to deal with the monster if it suddenly rears its head?

Developing Good Performance Practices

As Laurence Olivier said, the monster of stage fright can come at any time and in any form. Yet that doesn’t render us powerless. In fact, what I offer here are six strategies for handling stage fright if it does strike us in performance. As ever, these strategies mix practical actions (that we can take) with psychological mindsets (that we can adopt), so that – as ever – our body and brain can work together. And they’re also strategies that allow us to take some personal control.

The first performance practice returns us to one of the key tools we used for learning our lines in the first place – attention – and more specifically for us in performance, refocusing our attention on our partners and our actions.

Performance practice 1: refocusing our attention on our partners and our actions

Stage fright is basically a misdirection of our attention. We’ve seen throughout this book that if we choose to attend to and prioritise our fear, then that becomes our reality. If, on the other hand, we choose to attend to and prioritise the joys of acting, then that becomes our reality. Where we put our focus is very much within our control. So if we suddenly convince ourselves that the audience is out to get us, then it’s a sign that we’re holding that particular thought in our attention. As Peter Coyote describes: ‘Stage fright is imagining somebody else, out in the audience, thinking about you in a disparaging way. That means, your attention has gone out into the audience and you’re not concentrating on stage. To me, stage fright’s a dead giveaway that your concentration is off.’211 Taylor Clark adds to this perspective. He suggests that ‘the culprit in cases of meltdown under pressure isn’t fear, but misdirected focus’.²¹² So performance practice 1 is to take our attention away from our churning feelings, and to focus it instead towards our partner and the acting environment. And that act of refocusing can be as simple as if we were shining a torch beam. If we can take this simple, practical action, then what we perceive to be the critical eye of the audience becomes less important to us than what we’re actually doing on stage or in front of the camera. This is exactly the strategy adopted by actor David Annen in Kenneth Branagh’s 2013 production of Macbeth. So to unpack this practice further, we’re going to use a little more of the talking cure…

David Annen had always prided himself on being one of those performers upon whom actors and directors could rely – ‘dependable, solid and useful.’213 When stage fright struck him after more than twenty years in the business and just three nights away from the end of a highly successful run, he was totally shocked and somewhat devastated. His agonies were exacerbated by the fact that he was playing the comparatively small role of Seyward – a role that should have been easy. By the time Seyward appears for his major scenes, the play is well into its course but – just like Sam Graham playing Phoebe in As You Like It – the late arrival of Seyward on the scene only made Annen’s anxiety worse. In fact, by the end of those three final performances, he was almost crippled with fear. Rehearsing his lines ‘like an addict’ – backstage, in the street, and even in the moments when he was standing on stage just before his speech – Annen knew that he had to find a remedy otherwise he was screwed.

The production was set to go to New York’s Park Avenue Armory in collaboration with the Manchester International Festival. It was a big gig that really excited him, and he didn’t want the experience to be sabotaged by his mind-created panic. So sure enough – he faced his fear during the New York run. And he actually found his remedy in two strategies directly involving his focus of attention:

The first strategy was obvious really and was just about relationships and intentions. As Seyward, I was commanding the army and there were about twelve people on stage, one of whom I actually talked to (the young prince) and one of whom I referred to (Macduff). So to overcome my fear, I made sure I knew who all the other lords were and what my relationship with each of them was. I created imaginative connections for them. So when I looked each one in the eyes – and this strategy encouraged me to look them in the eyes – I knew why I was saying those particular lines to that particular lord. ‘You’re the hot-headed one, so I want to cool you down a bit.’ ‘You’re the scared one, so I want to gee you up a bit.’ It was only a few lines of script but I knew that if I looked them in the eye, I would know why I was speaking to them.

The second strategy was even more effective and involved just finding a really simple physical score to go with the words – particularly the speech that I was hung up on. As I said the words, ‘The time approaches, / That will with due decision make us know / What we shall say we have and what we owe’, I found that if I clenched my right fist on the world ‘will’ and my left fist on the word ‘know’ – which were both concrete, positive, powerful words – that would get me through those two lines. So that’s what I did – every night for three weeks. And I got the lines right every night for three weeks. And the panic lessened and at the end of those three weeks in New York, I was really pleased. I thought, ‘I’m a recovering stage-fright addict – and it’s all right.’214

By refocusing his attention on his partners and on some simple physical actions, Annen overcame his stage fright. He successfully lured his focus away from his fear and back to the basic storytelling. Like Mike Nichols said, when we get lost, we just need to drown in each other’s eyes.

That’s all well and good if we have an onstage partner. What about, for example, the situation that faced Benedict Cumberbatch and the blinking red eyes of the mobile phones during his Hamlet soliloquies at the Barbican in 2015? I suppose that if I were he – knowing that we can’t really police our audiences – I’d try to welcome in those red eyes. I’d twist the crystal on the situation, and rather than being frustrated by the phones, I’d use them to my advantage and turn them into partners. I’d see them as the eyes of God, questioning my existence. Or the eyes of my father, watching me from purgatory. Or the eyes of hundreds of souls, shining a light on what I’m doing. Which is exactly what they are… People in the darkness, recording for all time the quality of my performance as a living being. I’d invite those red eyes. Welcome them in. I might even suggest having a performance where everyone has to have a mobile phone, so that all I could see would be a sea of red-eyed monsters drawing me into ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘what dreams may come’… Since what we resist persists – and since we have to befriend our audience, rather than seeing them as the enemy – I’d relinquish my frustration, and if I can’t beat ’em, join ’em! The truth is, we’re in a technological millennium. The devices aren’t going away. It may be that live theatre is the last bastion of real, true in-the-moment, unmediated experience. But it’s going to be hard to enforce it, so we must do whatever we can to prevent the technology wrecking our focus or scuppering our love of acting.

At the end of the day, we all have these monkey-minds that leap from thought to thought. And if we can try to consciously refocus our attention in the moment of performance, we can go a long way towards taming them. While we can’t control our minds entirely, we can adjust our mindset so that we accept that monkey-spirit and live with it with humour. (‘Oh… there’s those mobile phones again!… Welcome… Welcome… Welcome…’) In order to be that playful, we can start by getting some perspective on perception. Which takes us to performance practice 2…

Performance practice 2: getting some perspective on perception

‘It is not what happens to you in life that determines how you feel; it is how your brain perceives reality that makes it so.’215 This sound insight from psychiatrist Daniel Amen means that it’s not just what we attend to that creates our experience: it’s how we perceive what we attend to. As we saw in Chapter 3, our brain isn’t like a camera that simply takes an objective picture of the world. We derive all sorts of meanings from what we see in a situation – meanings that are influenced by our beliefs, our past history, and our expectations. And how we evaluate those meanings is what we call perception.

When it comes to stage fright in performance, perception can be pretty darn powerful, as (in the words of Amen) ‘The view that your brain takes of a situation has more reality in it than the actual situation itself.’216 Our perception is incredibly creative. It manipulates reality. And therefore, it’s very unreliable. It’s so unreliable that, during moments of acute stage fright in performance, we can experience a complete collapse of our professional, social and artistic identity – and yet the audience wouldn’t have a clue! For all our catastrophic inner collapse, they may detect nothing more than a tiny blip in the rhythm of the play – perhaps a stutter, a stumble, a momentary glimpse of an actor on the edge of a breath. But that’s all. They have no idea about what we’re actually going through. So performance practice 2 is to get some perspective on what we perceive.

David Annen had just such an opportunity, as he had the unique experience of watching his own stage fright. The last night of Macbeth in Manchester was simultaneously streamed by National Theatre Live – across the world to literally millions of viewers. It was three nights into his awful, high-level performance anxiety, and in ‘preparation overdrive’, Annen’s panic couldn’t have been higher. ‘I just didn’t know how to cope, I didn’t know if I should tell anyone. I had to do the live broadcast, so I was thinking, “If it all goes wrong, I can give up acting, there’s probably something else I can do.” It was completely embarrassing and unforgiveable.’²¹⁷

The live broadcast began. And the fateful time approached for his fateful ‘time approaches’ speech – and sure enough he fluffed it. But was it ‘completely embarrassing’? Was it ‘unforgivable’? Absolutely not at all! Annen has subsequently had the chance to watch a recording of the broadcast and ‘It’s an extraordinary experience to watch what looks like a fairly calm and confident actor on stage, when I know that in my head is this paroxysm of fear. We get to the line and, sure enough, I mangle it again – but not so as you’d really notice. I say sort of the right lines in sort of the right order. It doesn’t quite scan, but you sort of get the sense of it.’ The audience really wouldn’t have noticed. After all, as Annen points out,

I think what happens anyway with audiences – especially with Shakespeare – is that they’re getting the gist of what’s being said, and if there’s something they don’t quite get, they’re on to the next thing straight away. So when people said to me afterwards, ‘It didn’t matter,’ I really think that either they hadn’t noticed or they thought it was fine. – Or they were just glad it wasn’t them! And actually I wasn’t the only person to make a mistake that night. Or any other night, for that matter. There’s always someone who fluffs a line or forgets something. So when I saw myself on the broadcast, I thought, ‘It’s really not the end of the world – but I’ve got to handle this better next time’.218

We can learn so much from Annen’s tale, as few of us actually get to see those fear-fuelled performances when we think we’ve utterly screwed up. What he illustrates is that it really is all about perception – and we have to remember that the audience often doesn’t notice, and they rarely really mind. The worst thing they’re going to perceive is an actor stopping completely, exiting to the wings, finding the lost line and coming back on stage – which is what Paul Greenwood and Olympia Dukakis both did. And the sky won’t fall our heads. And the earth will continue to turn. And the show will go on. And our career won’t judder to a terrifying halt. It’s vitally important – when we experience stage fright in performance – to check our perception of the situation. We need to review the ‘reality’ that our brain has momentarily constructed – and to let ourselves off the hook.

The provocative question here is: ‘Why did someone as experienced and reliable as David Annen suffer stage fright on this occasion?’ Answer: he was trying to deal with a small role.

Performance practice 3: dealing with a small role

It’s not uncommon for us to suffer stage fright just as badly in small roles as we might in leads – especially if we’re used to playing large roles. With a large role, we have the chance to experience a sense of flow – the arc of the character, the trajectory of the emotional changes, the development of relationships. We can get on a roll. It’s much, much harder to experience that in a small role – partly because we’re on stage so little (or so sporadically), and partly because every word and every move suddenly becomes so darn important to us. We’ve got so few lines to focus on, that – if we screw them up – it feels monumental. Whereas screw up a phrase or two in a big role and we’ve got plenty of chances to redeem ourselves.

In order for us to really assess what’s going on with small roles – so that (once again) we can be forewarned and forearmed – we’re going to turn to creativity expert and writer on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ‘cheek-sent-me-high’).

First of all, what is this thing called ‘flow’ that eludes us with small roles?

Flow (as Csikszentmihalyi describes) is ‘an optimal experience’.219 We become so involved in an activity, that nothing else seems to matter: the activity becomes all-consuming in and of itself. And for us to experience this optimal state, we need various conditions to be in place.

First of all, we have to know that we can achieve something with a particular activity.

Second, the activity has to line up with our goals.

Third, there has to be enough challenge involved in the activity to keep the task exciting for us.

And fourth, we have to be able to enjoy the actual task for its own sake with no other agenda or expectation about it.

Looking at these four conditions, you can see what the problem is if we’ve only got a small role. How can we flow when we’ve only got thirty lines? It’s difficult! And when it’s difficult to flow, it’s easy to feel stage fright.

So let’s look a little closer. Let’s take the first condition of flow – achievement – and go back to Sam Graham playing Phoebe, as well as David Annen playing Seyward. In each of these smallish roles – which both occur well into the narrative of each play – the two actors began to feel a sense of inadequacy. Were they achieving anything with these roles? For us to experience flow, there has to be a healthy balance between something that we have the skillset to achieve and something that pushes us to achieve it. It’s just like working out on a resistance machine. Too much weight and we can’t lift it. Too little weight and we don’t achieve anything. Both Graham and Annen are very adroit actors, who are used to taking leading roles: they’re used to lifting bigger weights. So the inner voices of self-doubt began asking whether they were achieving anything in the plays’ narratives with these smaller, more peripheral roles.

As for flow condition 2 – lining up with long-term goals – Graham found himself asking himself if the role would get him any future work. We can’t help it as actors: in the throes of one job, we find ourselves questioning where that job fits into our longer term career trajectory. After all, our ongoing concern about how to sustain our professional profile significantly contributes to our low-level anxiety.

As for flow condition 3 – the degree of challenge – it’s rare for a small role to bear any real responsibility for a play’s narrative. Unless of course it’s the Messenger in a Greek tragedy. Added to which, David Annen felt that he’d ‘cracked’ the role of Seyward fairly early in rehearsals and Kenneth Branagh as director was happy with what he was doing, so there was nothing for his curious brain to grapple with. And by the end of the run, his brain had gone stir crazy and was cookin’ up mayhem. Herein lies another paradox of acting: the harder the role, the more it consumes our attention, so that the task of acting becomes easier – and then we can flow.

And flow is a good feeling. Flow is addictive. Flow can give us a real high. It’s that feeling on stage or in front of the camera when we merge with a role – just as Stanislavsky described. (And, indeed, as I experienced with Margaret in Richard III.) We’re not making conscious choices in advance of a moment in order to elicit a particular response from the audience. It’s all just happening. It’s effortless. It flows. And when we’re in flow, any thought of stage fright doesn’t even come onto our radar. For actor Jonno Roberts: ‘It feels like being at the crest of a wave or skiing in front of an avalanche. It’s that kind of focus, where discoveries are tumbling along behind you.’220 For Jay Whittaker: ‘Flow is when I’m fully connected to the emotion of what’s happening and there’s no thought about the words or the blocking or the character… When I’m flowing, my mind is completely silent and there’s nothing going on beyond the play.’²²¹ When actors are just talking about flow – they flow!

Yet there’s a fourth condition for flow: enjoying the task for its own sake. We need the first three conditions to be in place for the fourth to kick in. However…

This fourth condition could actually provide a chance for us to take some conscious control. In our heart of hearts, we know that not every role is going to satisfy our creative needs. Not every role will give us flow. That’s just a fact of the business. Yet for Graham and Annen, the gigs were big. (One was with Declan Donnellan, and one was with Kenneth Branagh.) That fact in itself made career-sense. So when the role doesn’t challenge – but the gig excites – we should take solace in the fact that, although we’re not getting the full injection of creative flow in the role, we can at least just enjoy it for the simplicity of what it is. And, even if it’s not a big gig, sometimes it’s nice for the pressure to be off. Sometimes it’s nice for a job to be just a job.

That’s a philosophical mindset which can sustain us in the long term. But let’s come back to something more immediate. Which performance practices can we adopt if we’re actually in mid-scene when the stage fright gets us? Well, here’s a curiously intuition-based strategy that can really help us out – one that keeps our body in flow until our mind has had a chance to catch up…

Performance practice 4: switching our brain-channels from talking to moving

Remember Tim Orr’s story right back in the Introduction? The moment he forget his lines, he started doing physical activities – moving around the stage and picking up books. On the one hand, this gave him a concrete sense of being anchored to physical objects. (At least he had the security blanket of a prop to hold.) On the other hand, he was doing something very instinctive and very clever: he was switching channels in his brain. Basically (as we saw in Chapter 1 when we looked at worry), we can’t sustain two conversations at the same time – which means we can’t talk to ourselves in the Fear Voice whilst also trying to speak the lines of the play. Both of these activities are language-based, and so they’re using the same networks in our brain. The result is a bit like two trains trying to get along the same platform at the same time. If we can’t switch one of them to another track, there’s going to be a crash.

‘Doing two things at once that rely on similar brain regions,’ stresses Beilock, ‘is generally harder than doing two things that call on separate pools of brain power, because in the first case there are just fewer neural resources to go around.’²²² So when Orr started moving around the stage, he was intuitively switching tracks. He was changing from his language-based synaptic networks to his spatially based synaptic networks. And as soon as his body was occupied with moving through space, his inner computer was no longer overloaded with too much activity in the language neural networks. The joy was that, within seconds, the words that he’d been wracking his brain so hard to remember came flooding straight back to him. The ‘language’ platform was now vacant, so his ‘lines’ train could pull into his ‘performance’ station!

Although he was able to deal intuitively with the immediate situation, Orr still had to haul himself on stage every night to get through the rest of the run. In other words, the knock-on effects of the momentary lapse were more long term. And it’s true – big role or small – it haunts us when we screw up. However, if we do find ourselves replaying over and over what we think happened – how we dealt with it, how we think the audience might have perceived it, whether news of our glitch got back to the director – we need to stop! Instead of entertaining that Fear Voice, we need to use our imagination to a far healthier end. Which takes us to performance practice 5…

Performance practice 5: imaginatively rehearsing the success

We know that our imagination is active – how can it not be? We’re actors, for goodness’ sake! Our imagination is our most useful tool. Yet sometimes it’s not just active, it’s overactive. If we’ve had a performance screw-up, the stress-fuelled Fear Voice can endlessly replay that dreadful moment until we’re mortified to incapacitation. But we know that what we rehearse (even in our imagination) is what we bed-in – and we don’t want to bed-in dread. So let’s not! Let’s rehearse something different.

In fact, imaginary rehearsal – or ‘mental rehearsal’ – is used all the time by sports psychologists with athletes. They encourage them to picture the course, picture the race, picture the winning, picture the response of the crowds, picturing raising high the trophy – and this imaginary rehearsal can seriously improve their actual performance and reduce their chances of ‘choking’ (as we saw in Chapter 1). Science hasn’t yet proven the exact reason why our mental rehearsal can be so effective in dealing with performance anxiety. But that hardly matters. The important discovery is that, when we imagine ourselves performing a particular action, our muscular activity actually increases in those very muscle groups that would normally perform this activity if we were doing it in real life. In other words, our body and brain can’t tell the difference. As far as they’re concerned, imagining is doing. This just endorses all the extraordinary discoveries that we’ve learnt so far. Our brain – along with all its messages to our muscles – can’t tell the difference between reality and imagination. It really is extraordinary – because it means we have a huge amount of conscious control. It’s back to what we talked about in Chapter 3. If we’ve had an experience of stage fright in a performance – and it’s haunting us during the day so that we end up dreading the next performance – then we can stop in our tracks! Right here! Right now! We can change the inner channel – just like we’d change from BBC 1 to Channel 4, or from CNN to HBO. Instead of hard-wiring the panic, we can imaginatively rehearse the success. So, right now: imagine standing backstage in complete composure. Imagine sailing through the glitchy moment with complete aplomb. Imagine taking a bow with a well-won flourish. It’s not only simple; it’s pleasurable. I’ve said it before – and I’ll say it again: stage fright begins in our head, and that’s the very place it can end. We can recondition our brain to experience whatever we want to feel. We can imaginatively rehearse the performance that we want, and erase the performance that we fear.

But – yes, of course – we’re human. And the cynic inside may insist that this sounds like a miracle cure. So let’s suppose that, despite our strongest efforts, the willful monster still raises its ugly head (or, at least, we allow it to) when we’re actually in performance. We have a sixth practice that we can do for instant, short-term calm and confidence.

Performance practice 6: three anti-stress manoeuvres

Okay – we’re mid-performance – and the monster has arrived. (Don’t forget: ‘Know the enemy and know yourself.’ And we’re certainly getting to know our self here.) First things first – we finish the scene if at all possible. Then as soon as we come off stage, we follow three very tangible, physical, anti-stress manoeuvres. Those manoeuvres are:

• Sit down as soon as possible.

• Pause for a moment.

• And have a drink of water.

These three steps are adopted by soldiers in combat. So if it works for them, it should work for us. Indeed, science has proven that the very act of slowing down… then pausing… then drinking water gives our brain a chance to realign, refocus and calm down. Now, what could be simpler than that? If we can employ these battle tactics, General Sun Tzu would be proud.

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So, we’ve looked at some practices to stave off the fear at the rehearsal stage and we’ve looked at some practices for tackling it if it comes up in performance. Let’s look at some strategies for facing and embracing the fear in the long term, so that we can aim for all-round health and professional longevity.

Long-term Strategies for Facing
and Embracing the Fear

We’ve seen throughout this book that the one of the biggest mistakes that we make when we’re dealing with our fear is to avoid the situations that we’re scared of. ‘Avoidance ensures that the fear lives on,’ writes Taylor Clark.223 And that’s because, when we avoid something that makes us anxious, we don’t give ourselves a chance to see that whatever we’re scared of isn’t really so significant. (This is what Derek Jacobi tried to do for two years.) Nor do we give ourselves the opportunity to discover that we’re actually much better at dealing with the situation than we ever thought we would be. (This is what Derek Jacobi achieved after two years.) So rather than avoiding our fear, we need to coexist with it. We probably can’t annihilate it, but if we can coexist with it (as Clark points out), we learn how to be afraid. So here I offer some long-term strategies for facing and embracing our fear. If we can use them all in some way, shape or form, it may well be that, not only can we coexist with our fear, but we can actually overcome it. After all, when we sincerely and open-heartedly embrace an enemy, it’s impossible for them to feel like an enemy any more.

Long-term strategy 1: acknowledging our stage fright exists

All along we’ve seen that our mindset is half the battle. Successfully Facing the Fear really means acknowledging that our stage fright exists. And that may include sharing it with other actors. This was certainly a pacifier for David Annen when he finally voiced his fear to some of his colleagues in Macbeth. And it was an absolute clincher for me in The Permanent Way, when my conversations with Sam Graham and Matthew Dunster saved my acting life. As a result of which – little by little – I began to change my whole attitude towards stage fright. Rather than seeing it as a shameful, ‘dirty secret’, I took it as a chance for personal growth and an opportunity for courage. After all, ‘Bravery isn’t being fearless. Bravery… is being scared and doing the right thing anyway.’224 It was also the chief motivator in eventually writing this book. It took some time to truly face my fear, but once I did, it really did diminish. I’m now as close as I can be to having embraced it and finally overcome it. (Fingers crossed and a following wind, of course – but that’s all part of the game.) The purpose of this book is to speed up the whole process for you, so that it might only take days or weeks, rather than months and years. And that process can begin by welcoming the Fear in…

Long-term strategy 2: understanding risk sharpens our creativity

What’s the benefit of welcoming the Fear in? Well, the truth is that our stage fright actually sharpens our creativity. In other words, it’s not really a foe: it’s a friend. Let’s have a look at what that means…

According to Csikszentmihalyi, we have two contradictory sets of instructions within us as human beings. They’re instructions with which we’re born, so we simply can’t escape them. The first is our conservative tendency for self-preservation (i.e. we need to go carefully so that we don’t hurt or even kill ourselves). The second is our risk-taking tendency for exploration (i.e. we need to throw caution to the wind so that we learn all about the world around us).²²⁵

Although we need both of these tendencies to survive, it’s actually our risk-taking tendency for exploration that enables us to be truly creative. And yet that’s the tendency that’s hardest to follow: we’re far more likely to protect ourselves than take a risk and see what happens. So if we want to be truly creative, we have to consciously nurture our curiosity and actively take some risks. Otherwise our creativity will wilt. Facing our stage fright is one of those risks; in fact, facing our fear is a direct way of becoming truly creative. So all the more reason to do it. And being more creative might mean that we have to care less…

Long-term strategy 3: caring less

Perfectionism is no good. We saw that in Chapter 1. Those of us who are perfectionists and want to get everything absolutely right before we step on stage are actually less likely to be creative than those of us who are naturally more extrovert and enjoy a certain danger. So basically we don’t want to be perfectionists. If we seriously want to face our stage fright and become more creative, we actually have to care less! Obviously that doesn’t mean that we don’t care about our craft and our work. It simply means that we’re not overly full of cares. We need to allow the risk of not getting things perfect to be a legitimate – nay, a necessary – part of our creative process. After all, we already know that there is no such thing as a perfect performance. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon us to quieten the perfectionist streak that can thwart us. This imperative is urgent because our perfectionism doesn’t just fixate on perfecting a role: it also fixates on perfecting our career. And that’s just totally out of the question. A ‘perfect career’ is impossible in our highly competitive and wholly unpredictable profession. No one’s career is without the dark times…

Long-term strategy 4: dealing with the difficult times

As we’ve seen already in this book, everything in nature happens with equal and opposite force. I may be full of self-confidence when I’m Singin’ in the Rain – and filled with self-doubt when I’m waiting at tables. In other words, any creative impulse within us inherently has a destructive force in equal and opposite measure. So for us to develop any long-term strategies for our acting careers, we have to deal with the difficult times when we’re not being particularly creative.

One of the hardest facts of life for us to handle as actors is how inadequate we feel when we’re not working. We enter this tantalising profession with open eyes, knowing that huge chunks of our life involve giving away control of our destiny. We know that, much of the time, we’re at the mercy of other people to determine how, when, where, and whether we’re going to express our creative energy. So, for our professional longevity, we have to know how to handle the pendulum-swing of despair (when we’re out of work) – because, almost without fail, it follows the pendulum-swing of euphoria (when we’re in work). And there are a couple of practical realities that we need to face.

First of all, it’s a biological fact that, when we’re out of work, we’re not getting the adrenalin fix that usually comes with performance. There’s no dopamine pumping every night and day, making us feel good as the audience applauds or we watch the dailies. Which means there’s an actual, physiological change in our chemical make-up. We’re neurologically different when we’re performing from when we’re not performing. That’s a fact of life we can’t avoid. So we might as well reconcile ourselves to it and adjust our mindset accordingly.

Second, it’s worth accepting that, not only is a certain despair unavoidable, but – as Stephen Nachmanovitch proposes – it could actually be a vital part of our creative process: ‘Creative despair feels rotten when it overtakes us, but it is necessary – it is a symptom that we are throwing our whole being into the problem.’226 In fact, Nachmanovitch goes on to suggest that, ‘Unbeknownst to [the actor], the momentum of all his practice carries through, unconsciously, during the dark night of the soul.’²²⁷ In other words, our creativity doesn’t die when we’re out of work. It incubates. It waits. It silently revitalises. Our creativity needs the dark night of the soul, just as much as the fertile earth needs the dead of winter. So we shouldn’t try to avoid the despair simply because we prefer the euphoria: we need both. If we can adopt this perspective, it can be remarkably empowering. We’re no longer scared by the pendulum-swing between creative euphoria and dark despair: we understand that it’s an intrinsic and vital aspect of our long-term creative flow. And then it’s much easier to face it.

So those are four strategies for facing the fear: let’s see if we’re ready to embrace it.

Long-term strategy 5: talking back to the Fear Voice

One of the first things we can do in embracing our fear is to treat it like a friend. We’d embrace a friend – so let’s embrace the Fear. That means we can talk back to our self-sabotaging Fear Voice, even if it starts up in performance. Rather than buying into our toxic introjects, sports psychologist Don Green suggests that we answer the Fear Voice with ‘a very conscious, logical, knowing response’.228 ‘Look, buddy, I’ll listen to you later once this performance is over, but for the moment I’ve got a job to do.’ That way, we’re not ignoring the monkey-mind’s desire to indulge the imps of mischief – we’re just saying, ‘Not now. Later.’ – Just as we might to an insistent child, who’s tugging at our sleeve because they want some chocolate.

Long-term strategy 6: reframing the situation – and having a laugh!

Our final strategy for embracing our fear in the long term is to reframe the situation. Time and again in this book, we’ve raised this as an option. And it really is invaluable. One way to reframe the situation is simply to use different vocabulary. So rather than seeing stage fright as a problem that can beat us, we see it as a challenge that can be met.²²⁹ The simple mental repackaging of ‘problem’ as ‘challenge’ can be surprisingly effective. And then maybe we can change ‘challenge’ to ‘game’. And ‘game’ to ‘fun’. After all, we know that fun and fear can’t coexist, so why not let the fun diffuse the fear?

Which takes us to another means of reframing the situation, and that’s to use humour. ‘Your humour is a definite ally,’ says Green. ‘When your humour kicks in, it’s really wonderful.’230 By relocating our fear in the funny zone, we can’t help but yank it out of the fear zone – because we start to see it from a new angle. And this is because humour ‘is about playing with ideas and concepts,’ explains clinical psychologist Rod Martin. ‘So whenever we see something as funny, we’re looking at it from a different perspective.’²³¹ It’s true that, when stage fright kicks in, we can become locked in a rigid, almost claustrophobic mindset of ‘I can’t do this. This is terrifying! I’m useless! I’ve got to get out of here.’ Yet (as Martin suggests), ‘if you can take a humorous perspective, then by definition you’re looking at it differently – you’re breaking out of that rigid mind-set.’²³²

When you think about it, we’re lucky as actors, in that our craft is all about play, pleasure, games and entertainment. Where’s the humour in being a tax collector? Or a sewage farmer? Or a shelf-stacker? We’ve got it for free. As my publisher Nick Hern recounted: ‘Long ago, a friend told me about one of her tutors who was playing King Lear in a university production. At the dress rehearsal before a small audience of friends, this guy was working himself into a real state as he tore the part to pieces, when, from the audience, came a voice, “For God’s sake, Harry, it’s only a play!” ’²³³ It is only a play, so we should play. The very nature of what we do – putting on costumes and pretending to be other people – can be a liberating way of hooking us back into the childlike joy of our work. So next time we find ourselves wavering in the wings or fluttering on the film set, we should stop for a moment and look at what we’re doing. These strange clothes. Someone else’s words. The mass of people bashing their palms together to thank us for our work.

So the next time you think the monster of stage-fright is tracking you down – just picture Herman Munster.

Morph the mind-gripping demon into Taz the Tasmanian devil.

Morph the self-sabotaging imp into Rumpelstiltskin in Shrek.

Morph the worm of self-doubt into the Inch Worm in Sesame Street.

Our imagination is capable of playing this game, and it’s hard to take any of the stage-fright monsters seriously when they look so silly or childlike.

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So we’ve had some strategies for life at large; some specific strategies for acting (in general, in rehearsal and in performance); and some long-term strategies for facing and embracing our fear. The last two sections of this chapter look at how we might face our fear at the two bookends of our professional activity: auditions (before we’ve even hooked the role) and post-performance processes (which can be just as useful as anything else when it comes to conquering our stage fright).

Best Practice for Auditions

Auditions are immoral. In what can be as little as two minutes, we have to show to a panel of career-carving judges the arsenal of our artistic ingenuity. In fact, their very format undermines our real creativity, in the sense that it sets the right hemisphere of our brain (the creative part) against the left hemisphere of our brain (the organising part). The right brain needs freedom and flow, and for us to be really present to a situation, that situation has to be free of judgement or agenda. But we know that that’s exactly what auditions are all about – judgements and agendas. That’s their point – to assess whether or not we’re right for the role and to get the piece cast. Added to which, auditions and showcases are full of all sorts of ‘left-brain’ organising rules: ‘Don’t let your piece be longer than ninety seconds. Don’t look your auditioners in the eye. Your headshot must be this dimension. Your CV must be in this format. Don’t ask questions unless asked for them’, etc. All those left-brain regulations are totally at odds with our right-brain flow. And whenever a situation pulls us from right brain to left brain, our body can change significantly: we feel tense, our heart pounds, our anxieties are aroused. And with all those psychophysical changes, it’s incredibly hard to be really present and inspired. So auditions are (by design) inclined to off-balance our creative natures.

Yet – as ever – forewarned is forearmed. We know auditions are unavoidable: they’re the gateway between us and the industry. So we may as well learn to love them, and one of the ways to do that is to acknowledge how they implicitly challenge our creative ease by inadvertently pulling us from right brain to left brain. Once we acknowledge that – forewarned, therefore forearmed – we have the choice to harness some of that left-brain organising potential to our own advantage. Here’s how…

Do you remember right at the beginning of this chapter, Beth Klein of Universal Television suggested we should forget about what we can’t control and focus on what we can? Since there so many things that we can’t control in an audition set-up, we simply have to focus on whatever we can fix. So what can we use our left-brain organising potential to control? We can do our preparation on the role. We can do our research on the director or the writer, the play or the television series, the theatre or the film company. (That way, we can know the full context of what we’re going into.) We can find out logistically where we’ve got to be – which area, which street, which building, which room. We can arrive there in plenty of time. And then we can focus on our mindset. We can use our left brain to help us consciously with the frame of mind we choose to adopt. You could say that nowhere is mindset more important than in auditions. So here are just a few prompts to help us with that mindset.

Mindset prompt 1: ‘They need us as much as we need them!’

First of all, we can remind ourselves that auditions have very little to do with our talent. They don’t test us as artists; they simply assess whether or not we’re right/useful/appropriate/castable (delete as appropriate) for a particular role. Part of the mindset is reminding ourselves how nerve-wracking it can be for the auditioners, too! At the end of the day, they’ve got to find the best possible cast for this particular production or film or TV pilot. They need to ascertain whether the person who walks into the room can do the job with talent, personality, charm, charisma and commercial certainty. After all, a lot of time, money and kudos depend on whether or not their production is a success. So don’t forget: they need us as much as we need them! We’re all here to help each other to make the best possible piece of work.

Mindset prompt 2: ‘Enjoy it for its own sake!’

Second, auditions have a lot to do with our behaviour. Given how nerve-wracking it is for the casting team, the more we can demonstrate that we actually like being there, the better. In his seminal book, Audition, veteran casting director Michael Shurtleff advises: ‘You’re not at an audition to do the scene right, but to show the auditors who you are. Give yourself a chance. Worry less about the material and more about what you would do and feel if you were in that situation. The play gives you a situation; your job is to put yourself in it.’234 By shifting from ‘Will I get this part?’ to ‘What would I do if I were in this situation?’ we adapt the context of the audition from ‘being judged as an actor’ to ‘telling a mini-story’. If we think of the audition as something that’s pleasurable in and of itself, we can change our whole perspective and radically reduce our nerves. Then we’re not overwhelmingly obsessed by whether or not we get the part: we’re just doing our job here and now – and we’re going to enjoy it for its own sake!

Mindset prompt 3: ‘There’s no one like us in the whole world!’

You could say that these shifts in mindset and behaviour are just semantic. Yet – hold! Throughout this book, we’ve seen just how vividly our brain responds to the thoughts and words we give it. So we might as well give it the right thoughts and words. We might as well give it the prompts of, ‘Hey, this is fun – I can strut my stuff!’ rather than the prompts of, ‘Oh my God – I’m being judged!’ As Shurtleff reminds us, what the auditioners want to see at an audition is ‘the real you reacting to a remarkable situation in a remarkable and unique way. There’s only one person like you in the entire world. Trust yourself to use that with truth and imagination.’235 Don’t forget that, as actors, we already have all the materials we need inside us. We’ve got the emotions, the imagination and the technique. Now we just have to ‘get out of our own way’ in the audition, so that we can reveal and share those invaluable materials. There’s no one like us in the whole world! Now, isn’t that fantastic?

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If we can change our perspective like this – helped by these mindset prompts – we can start to relinquish the nerves of auditions and embrace the absolute pleasure of the challenge instead.

Now from one bookend of our profession to the opposite other…

Best Post-performance Practice

The mindset that we develop after a performance can be just as powerful for allaying or whipping up our stage fright as anything we do before or during. Of course we all want praise. Isn’t the applause part of the reason we went into acting in the first place? Yet culturally, applause is expressed differently the world over. In North America, audiences love standing ovations. In England, they can be gently muted and very polite. In Russia, they might slow handclap. In Germany, they famously boo. We tend to have various expectations of audience responses in the theatre – and at the same time we know that the audience’s chance to respond is actually scripted into the end of a show! So it’s all a bit of a ritual.

With television and film it can be different, as we’re usually less aware of how our work has been received at the time we actually do it. We may receive a few words on set from the director at the end of a day’s shoot – and obviously much more at the final wrap of the film. But everyone is so up-against-the-clock that there isn’t much time for backslapping and handclapping. So why do we care so much about our post-performance reflections? Why do we mull over our work so doggedly once it’s done? And how do we stop it? Well, actually it’s back to having a sense of perspective.

Post-performance practice 1: have a sense of perspective

When we feel that we’ve given a bad performance, we often want to scurry off in a sorry state of self-judgement and self-punishment. Yet the director can think it was our best show to date. And the opposite is true, too. We can think we’ve given a great performance, only to find that it didn’t read quite so brilliantly to our spectators. What we experience and what they receive can be completely different realities. So we really need to have a sense of perspective. We have to be mindful as actors that, immediately after a performance, our senses are very heightened – and, therefore, they can be pretty unreliable. If anyone says anything too critical, we can’t necessarily receive it constructively. If anyone says anything adulatory, it can sometimes give us a slanted stance on what actually happened. Feedback, praise and criticism are necessary parts of the dialogue, but they’re best treated with an appropriate pinch of salt along with a peppering of perspective. And that also means knowing whose feedback we trust.

Post-performance practice 2: know whose feedback we trust

Knowing whose feedback we trust is very useful. For me professionally, it’s the director (who has seen the work at various stages of the process and so has various yardsticks to go by), and my husband (who’s a wonderful actor-director with a keen aesthetic taste). For me personally, it’s my father (whose intelligence is sharp and whose ambition for me is sincere), and my agent (who has seen my evolution over more than twenty years). Beyond that, I keep an open-minded eye and ear on any other critique. Of course it’s lovely if my loyal family and friends like it (and I’ve got some friends who hate everything). It’s wonderful if the critics support it, but as we saw in Chapter 2, there’s a certain caution there, too. Immediately after a performance, we need time for our creative pores to close before we can hear the feedback (good or bad) with any sense of objectivity. As Mike Alfreds understandingly reports an actor once telling him,

‘Look, Mike, you’ve got to understand that when we’re in the middle of the show or just at the end of it, our adrenaline is high. Whether or not we’ve given a good show, we’ve been out there working hard and seriously – and we’re in no fit state to absorb anything you have to say. You must realise that when actors are performing, especially in the way you ask of us, we’re extremely vulnerable. And getting notes when we’re in that state only makes us resentful and defensive – and angry with you. What we want now isn’t notes, but a drink! Give us the notes tomorrow when we’re in a receptive frame of mind to appreciate them.’236

Ain’t that the truth?

Added to knowing whose feedback we trust, we should also consider that our own truth is worth trusting.

Post-performance practice 3: trust our own truth

Since our industry is so unpredictable and opinions are so variable, we ultimately have to have a sense of our own truth. We have to have a tiny kernel of honesty inside us that we can trust as a barometer of what went well and what needs working. If we can take time to develop our own best practices – physically, psychologically, and psychophysically – we can start to nurture that inner-truth barometer. Armed with our own sense of truth, we can begin to face, embrace, and ultimately diminish the monster of fear.

While the scary thing about stage fright is that it’s really all in our heads, the wonderful thing about dealing with stage fright is that it is all in our heads! It’s just another paradox of acting. We can take control over the choices we make, as well as the perspectives we take, and then we can start to relinquish stage fright’s feverish grasp. At the end of the day, it really is up to us.

Overview

In this chapter, we’ve looked at a wide range of practical and philosophical strategies to enable us to develop our own practices. We’ve briefly addressed basic physical issues (including sleep, exercise, nutrition and avoidances). We’ve addressed some psychophysical issues (including breathing, meditation and yoga). We’ve negotiated three particular types of preparation (general approaches to our creative work; best practices for rehearsal; and best practices for performance). We’ve considered some longer term strategies for facing and embracing our fear. And we’ve ended with a few handy hints for adopting helpful mindsets towards auditions and post-performance practices.

Whether we try to do all of these, or some of these, or different ones at different times (depending on the role, issue or medium), we should each be close to developing a unique art of war. Armed with that knowledge, we’re equipped to go out and face, embrace and overcome our stage fright.

Now that’s a big achievement.

We’re on the way!

Bravo!