Debrief

Among his five fundamental factors for the art of war, General Sun Tzu cites ‘command’: ‘By command,’ he writes, ‘I mean the general’s qualities of wisdom, sincerity, humanity, courage, and strictness.’237

At the end of this journey into the heart of stage fright, we’ve covered a wide terrain and assessed a multitude of strategies. We’ve also developed the qualities of a commanding general.

• We’ve developed wisdom about the nature of our fear and how it operates.

• Sincerity in our strategies for overcoming it.

• Humanity in seeing it as something to be embraced as much as something to be fought.

• Courage to realise that it’s really ourselves who serve as our enemy.

• And strictness (or focus) in our thoughts and attention – to embrace our fear foes and, in doing so, overcome them.

We’ve developed these qualities by following a structured battle plan. We’ve looked at what stage fright is. We’ve understood its roots in the actor-audience relationship. We’ve probed how we learn and developed some strategies for memory. We’ve honoured the work that we do in the rehearsal room with our directors and our acting partners. And we’ve taken responsibility for how we can affect our creative well-being.

So where do we end as we face and embrace the Fear, and trust that we’re well on our way to overcoming it? I propose we end with a new beginning…

A new acting paradigm

As actors, we know that we’re our own instrument. We also know that that instrument changes every day. In fact, it changes every moment (as we saw in Chapter 3 with the dynamic activities of our autobiographical self).

And at the same time as the Tiny Picture of our individual instrument is changing, the Enormous Picture of science’s understanding of human behaviour is also changing. We know that every day some new discovery is made about the mysteries of our brain. And whatever developments we make in science inevitably impact on acting.

One of the key developments in science at this point in the twenty-first century is what’s known as ‘the enactive approach’.²³⁸ This term was introduced to me by pioneering actor-trainer and director, Phillip B. Zarrilli, in the summer of 2014. The enactive approach (or ‘enactivism’) has emerged over the last twenty years from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, and it has informed how our emotions, moods and feelings are studied. And we’ve touched upon it subtly throughout this book.

The basic premise with the enactive approach is that there’s no difference between our emotions and our thoughts. We are what we are in each moment – be it in our thoughts, our senses, or our imagination. Any separation between our body and our brain is obsolete and unhelpful: ‘Descartes’ Error’, as Antonio Damasio calls it.

So how does this affect us as actors facing stage fright?

It means that whatever we experience here-today-now is who we are, so use it. Whatever we think here-today-now is who we are, so use it. As enactive beings, we can use fear as a motivating energy – and thus we can transform it. After all, our brain only knows the nanosecond of ‘Now’!

As we saw with ‘meditation’, we can change our thoughts.

As we saw with ‘perception’ we can change our thoughts.

As we saw with the mindsets of ‘auditions’, we can change our thoughts.

And because, according to enactivism, our thoughts and emotions are really the same thing, when we change our thoughts, we change our feelings. We can think ourselves into whatever we want to feel. We really can condition ourselves (as we saw in Chapters 1 and 3) to experience whatever we want whenever we want.

And we can do it now! At any one moment, we have the possibility to choose our thoughts, and to make decisions about our feelings and our actions.

Of course it doesn’t mean that, if our character is in a state of murderous anger, we’ll become angry murderers – because we know that the primary condition for us as actors is dual consciousness. (We merge with the character whilst also attending to all the technical conditions of the job.) But what it does mean is that we can think ourselves into stage fright – and, with wisdom, sincerity, humanity, courage, and focus – we can think ourselves out of stage fright.

So, is it too simplistic to say that Facing the Fear is simply ‘Mind Over Matter’? Not really. Though we could put it this way: ‘Do you want to be scared of what you love? Do you want to keep on hitting yourself over the head with a hammer? If so, then do it – and eventually you’ll give it up.’

Or we could put it this way: ‘Do you want celebrate this great art form and wonderful (if sometimes infuriating) profession, for which you’ve trained and to which you’ve devoted your professional life? If so, then do that, instead – and sustain a lifelong career!’

‘But,’ you may ask, ‘if it really is so simple, why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning of the book and save me two hundred and fifty pages?’

‘Because,’ I may reply, ‘you wouldn’t have believed me.’ We needed to go on the journey – into the war room, out on the battlefield, into our brains, back in time, into the rehearsal room, out onto the stage, and in front of the camera. We needed to understand the enemy’s manoeuvres and our own best battle strategies. We needed all that in order for us to feel we’d earned the right to say, ‘I’ve been to the edge of the abyss, I’ve looked over, and I’ve returned.’ The joy of ‘being enactive’ is that it enables us to be both better actors in the role (as we live and breathe through the circumstances of the character), and better actors in life (as we’re no longer hounded by the imps of stage fright).

After three years of researching this book and ten years of considering my own stage fright, I actually find myself laughing. While I want to have the gracious command of a learned general, I really have the joyful chuckle of a Christmas elf. Having looked at stage fright from all angles – its history, its neuroscience, its manifestations both physiological and psychological – it seems absurd to be scared of something that we love so much. We might as well face our fears, embrace our fears, and for heaven’s sake be done with them. Mightn’t we? In a sobering moment, I once heard a young boy ask his mother, ‘Who’s Marilyn Monroe…?’ Everything we do is ephemeral – so we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

In which case, let’s have the wisdom to be great storytellers.

The sincerity to honour our profession.

The humanity to reach out to our audiences.

The courage to work to the tips of our nerve endings.

And the discipline to coexist with our fear and to use it to our best creative ends.

We’ve been to the edge…

…we’ve looked over…

…now we’re back again!

For good.