If, then, the target is so important, how do we get cut off from it? The answer is simple. It is Fear that cuts us off from the target. Fear severs us from our only source of energy; that is how Fear starves us. No theatre work absorbs more energy than dealing with the effects of Fear; and Fear is, without a single exception, destructive. The more Fear stalks the rehearsal room, the more the work suffers. Fear makes it difficult to disagree. Fear creates as much false consensus as strife. A healthy working atmosphere, where we can risk and fail, is indispensable. Fear corrodes this trust, undermines our confidence and clots our work. And the rehearsal must feel safe so that the performance may seem dangerous.
Before Irina can use the rules of the target to help her, she must first consider quite specifically, exactly what it is that Fear is doing to her. This chapter may seem like a deviation, but not even the target can help us until we face the effects of Fear.
So what then is this particular capitalised ‘Fear’? It is hard to define because it is a personal amalgam of countless shifting emotions, always changing shape like a shoal of fish. It is connected with Doubt and has links to Shame. Like all labels this word this ‘Fear’ is woefully generalised. Shakespeare was fascinated by this phenomenon and some of his greatest writing describes it. It is the thing that stops us performing our given action and both hobbles and motors Macbeth, Troilus and Hamlet.
This Fear is not to be confused with the feeling that any one of us might have if a lunatic rushed into the room waving a rifle. Sometimes, this Fear comes wearing a mask: arrogance is a favourite disguise and mannerism is another. Sometimes we know we are possessed by this Fear, but often the parasite is invisible to the host. We can always infer that Fear is fat and healthy whenever we experience ‘block’.
However, Irina can take heart, because ultimately the actor’s Fear is a paper tiger, a Wizard of Oz who crumbles when dragged into the open. ‘Don’t worry!’ is easily said, and may rank high as a piece of counterproductive advice. But in fact there is no actual need to worry. Well, how can there be, when ‘worrying’ is the cause of the problem? It is normally prudent to take precautions. But worry is always imprudent.
Fear can be dealt with. But first of all our Fear needs to be acknowledged and seen. And it is better if we can prepare ourselves when cool, rather than when we are choking in its grip. Only by seeing Fear can it be thought about, objectified and overcome. This may help.
A fable: the Devil
Fear is like the Devil. The good news is that he doesn’t exist, the bad news is that that is precisely why we can’t get rid of him. The Devil derives his power by flickering at the sides of our vision. He splits in two and winks at us from right and left, neither fully in our vision, nor fully out of it. His overwhelming desire is to divorce you from the target: ‘Don’t bother looking at anything,’ he whispers, ‘because we’re all looking at you. All you should worry about is you. Will you, the actor, fail or not? Will you, the actor, be judged good or bad? Seem talented? Look good? Be wanted? Get dropped? Be humiliated?’
If this miserable stage is reached, we may remember what Christ told the Devil in the desert: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ The Devil’s power is that we only ever glimpse him. Therefore the best place to stick him is behind. Only behind us is he fully out of sight and then we can go forward. He will, however, try and try again to invade the periphery of our vision. We panic that he wants to leap in front of us, but that is his great bluff. If the Devil jumped in front and faced us, he would vanish. He rules by pretending that, like the Gorgon, the mere glimpse of him would paralyse us. But no, to see him fully would be to destroy him fully. Similarly, we can never get rid of Fear. But we can keep booting him behind us.
The division of time
All problems of block get cured in the ‘now’.
Fear does not exist in the ‘now’. So he has to invent a pretend time to inhabit and rule. He takes the only real time, the present, and splits it into two fake time zones. One half he calls the past, and the other half he calls the future. And those are the only two places he can live. Fear governs the future as Anxiety, and the past as Guilt.
So the actor is deluded into leaving the target in the present, absconding with Fear into the past and the future, and the result is block. In fact, although its effects are felt in the present, block can only start in the past and the future. An obvious example is the fear of ‘drying’. Actually actors rarely forget their lines when they remain present. However, as soon as Irina has the thought: ‘Oh my God! I don’t think I can remember my next line’, she is predicting what will come; she quits the present. ‘I will forget my text’ anticipates the future, but actually tricks Irina into forgetting her text now.
Another classic recipe for disaster is to think: ‘The bit I have just done was dreadful but I will try to make the next bit really good!’ The second I snub the present to flirt with the past or the future gives Fear his chance. Fear cannot breathe while the actor remains present.
Presence
Does the actor have to try to be present? The answer is no. We cannot try to be present, precisely because we already are present. So what can we do? Can we work with the double-negatives? For example, can we try not to make ourselves absent? The difficulty is that any ‘trying’ tends to make the actor concentrate, which congeals the flow of attention and cuts off the target.
‘Being present seems so hard, remaining present seems even harder!’ These are both delusions of Fear.
In reality we are present, we can do absolutely nothing to alter that. But we can fantasise that we are somewhere else. In fact we have evolved such ingenious devices to delude ourselves that we are absent that it is extremely difficult to switch them off. But certain principles can always help. First: as I am already present, I cannot actually become present. When I try to be present, it is a brilliant scam of Fear. For trying to do anything makes us concentrate and sends us home. Fear often uses this particular trick to confuse us, by getting us to struggle to become . . . what, in fact, we already are. Imagine you are a guest, comfortably seated on a sofa, when your host suddenly rushes in and starts insisting that you sit down. When you remonstrate ‘But I am already sitting!’ he just yells: ‘Well, try harder!’ And if you decide that he is the sane one and not you, and if you do try to oblige him, and if you do try to ‘sit’ more because somehow you are not doing it well enough . . . and if you go on trying . . . and if he gets more and more frustrated and starts to shout, crazy as it sounds, all this is precisely what happens when we try to be present.
We get so confused that we knock ourselves out. Then Fear can drag us off by the heels.
Part of the cure for block is to remember calmly that you are present, and that no one and nothing can kidnap you. No, not even you yourself can run in with a chloroformed gag and abduct you. The worst that can happen is that you delude yourself that you are not present. We cannot struggle to be present. We can only discover that we are present. Being present is given to us, like a gift, like a present. It cannot be stolen from us, but we can fool ourselves otherwise.
The hiding of the rules
Fear has no power over the target, but he can make you believe that the target has abandoned you. To do this he has to delude you that the rules of the target do not exist, and so he tries to hide each of the six rules in turn.
1: There is always a target
His attack on the first rule is simple but devastating. ‘There is no such thing as a target. It is all a lie.’ Fear whispers. ‘You are all alone. You can only depend on you.’
2: The target exists outside and at a measurable distance
Distance enables because we need space to see. If we stand in the same place as something we will never see it. So fear must now conceal the second rule: that the target always exists outside in measurable space. He destroys a sense of distance and space by pretending that the imagination takes place exclusively within. ‘Everything I can imagine must take place inside my head. My imagination is internal. Everything I imagine takes place right inside me.’ The grim logic takes its toll. There now seems to be no enabling distance between you and the target. That helpful gulf has vanished and now you are jammed up with the outside world, like a face against a wall. No distance: no sight.
3: The target exists before you need it
Fear also undermines the third rule, that the target already exists. He manages to confuse you by splitting time in parallel mirrors, as in a lift which multiplies you infinitely as you wait for your floor. These mirrors, the past and future, distract you till you cannot see the target there waving. Then Fear calls up his old friends in the Government: Blame, Obligation, and Punishment will help control you. Responsibility he heaps on your shoulders, Duty he chains round your neck. ‘It is up to you,’ they all murmur, ‘to invent things; nothing is waiting to be discovered. Your duty is to manufacture all, energise all and control all. You are solely responsible for absolutely everything. You are even accountable for what is not happening and you are letting everybody down. Why are you so lazy/useless/empty/thoughtless/unimaginative/talentless?’ There is no stricter moralist than Fear; and no moralist is a stranger to Fear.
4: The target is always specific
Fear now must blur rule four, which states that the target is always specific. Now, the thing we irrationally fear certainly appears specific. But that phantom disaster only seems hideously real. So hideous in fact that we never let ourselves get close enough to examine it. So we are terrified that we will . . . what? It is worth asking the simple question. So obvious that sometimes we never give ourselves time to answer it. What might we do? Fall off the stage? Act badly? So far as I know, no one has ever died because they gave a poor performance. The terror that appears so frighteningly real diminishes under closer scrutiny. Of course it is sad to do poor work. But then, we inevitably do a lot of bad work and we all have to deal with that. But it is Fear that gets us to do bad work, so the fear of working badly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather as guilt makes us irresponsible.
The fear that things might go badly has to be kept in proportion. Will the earth really implode if I give a duff performance? Steeling ourselves to examine the face of the thing we fear will diminish that fear. Fear’s ploy is to stop us looking at him, or indeed anything else, closely and attentively. When panic strikes it helps to remember that the simple act of paying attention is calming. In fact only attentiveness brings peace. If we are so terrified of what we might see that we never pay attention to anything, we abandon ourselves to chaos.
5: The target is always transforming
6: The target is always active
With a final offensive to destroy all motion, Fear now advances to undermine the fifth and sixth rules: that the target is always transforming and active. ‘Wrong!’ says Fear, ‘the target is passive, immobile and unchanging!’ Fear then is probably alive and well and tunnelling away when I complain that my partner is wooden, and doesn’t play the scene live. ‘I get nothing back from him!’
An unyielding partner may be uninspiring; but there 1s something seriously wrong if I am able to monitor my partner’s quality of performance. It is more useful to ask if the person who does not yield is, in fact, me.
The actor who is disappointed by his partner’s performance – ‘I don’t believe Juliet loves me enough for me to play the scene’ – needs to see the Juliet who does love him enough. It is the actor’s challenge to believe, more than his partner’s problem to convince him.
Similarly, whenever I complain that: ‘I keep hearing my voice echoing back at me, droning monotonously away!’ I can also infer that Fear is busy at his sabotage. Because, of course, whenever I listen to how my own voice sounds, it must sound strange. The voice is a tool for doing things. It is not a tool for generalised self-expression. To use words well I need to imagine what my partner hears and does not hear. I need to imagine what is heard and what remains unheard. I need attend only to the target. My only business is with the target. When, in the midst of talking, I stop to listen to how I am speaking, I invariably confuse both whoever I am speaking to – and also myself. My own words start to sound fake. Indeed, my words actually become fake at the precise moment I detach them from the target. The cleverest words become gobbledygook when they are divorced from a target. It is hard for this to happen in real life, because, on the whole, in real life, when we lose the target we run out of words.
The danger is that, when acting, we can memorise huge chunks of words from a script that someone else has written. But that does not let us off the hook of having to attach these words to the world outside. We may imagine that the words mean something of themselves. But even the most brilliant script is unintelligible if it is not connected to the outside world, if it is detached from the target. Every word, in fact, needs to be caused by the outside world. All text becomes gibberish if detached from the target. Perhaps this sheds some light on why our recorded voices often make us cringe.
When all around seems dead, it is a delusion. Fear has doped us till we no longer see the target changing and moving.
The rogue eye
Fear splits you into another delusory double: you, and the other ‘judging’ you, the ‘doing’ you and the ‘watching’ you. This second, monitoring you is a harsh critic and beams back a relentless progress report. ‘How am I doing? . . . OK? . . . Oh God . . . As bad as that?’ And you can neither hide nor escape from this rogue eye.
So you believe that you are your own target, nothing exists save you and your rogue eye, soaring outside your body, distracting you from any other target. You’re apparently all alone, with nothing but a fake target for company. And that is merely a split part of you, dancing behind the audience’s heads, winking and taunting: ‘You’re useless’ or, more occasionally: ‘You’re brilliant!’ You become your own best friend, and so your only friend. ‘Who else do I need when I have me?’ No space for a third in that steamy relationship, and all the time Fear is smiling and beckoning.
A digression: Narcissus, Echo and Medusa
Narcissus and Medusa suffered from the rogue eye. The gods punished Narcissus for gazing at his own reflection in the water. He was turned into a flower and condemned to stare at himself for ever. But the gods punished Narcissus neither for ignoring Echo nor for his obsession with his looks. Indeed, if he could have seen his own true beauty perhaps Narcissus would have been a lot better off.
So why did they punish him? The problem was that he saw something else in the water. Narcissus caught his own gaze looking back. He actually caught sight of …himself seeing. And as he saw himself seeing, the living action of seeing was transformed into a deathly state. Narcissus stumbled on a subtle way to blind himself – by perverting his sight and turning his gaze neither on the outer world, nor on himself, but on his own seeing. He managed to paralyse his own sight.
The Gorgon Medusa suffered a similar fate. Her gaze froze her victims into stone. But in Perseus’ shield she also saw her own eyes seeing. Her petrifying stare bounced back and she paralysed not Perseus, but herself.
Narcissus and Medusa poisoned their own capacities to see. Their sight was a function to share generously. And the Gods punished their meanness with paralysis. The actor makes exactly the same mistake by believing that his relation with the outside world is an inner, ownable state. My sight is not a valuable possession. My sight is an essential resource I share with whatever I see. Poor Narcissus has to freeze in gardens every March; we can remember his story when we feel paralysed too. It is more constructive to throw ourselves on a target than to monitor ourselves.
The myths of Echo and Narcissus did not originate as pretty stories for a fresco. Stories, however, never do quite what we want, as we shall consider later.
The second uncomfortable choice:
freedom or independence
We now need to consider the second uncomfortable choice: freedom or independence. You choose. You can have either, but not both, because one must destroy the other.
Freedom is everything, but independence is nothing. Independence is born of fear. The desire for independence is common. We don’t want to depend on things that might let us down. But trying to renounce all dependence is folly. We need the outside world. We need oxygen, food, and stimulus. We need targets. Freedom is a mystery. Like presence, it is a given. However oppressed we may be, we can still retain a spark of freedom that makes us human. Strangely, we often find the prospect of real freedom quite frightening. Like presence, freedom seems too big and alarmingly undependable. ‘I don’t make my freedom, so I can’t control it. But the thing that I myself make, that thing I can control not to leave me. So I’ll invent a synthetic freedom, call it “independence”, and keep it on a lead. And it will do everything I say.’
Professor Frankenstein thought the same . . .
Need and hate
Many acting problems derive from the simple paradox that we hate the thing we need. The most useful things are given; but we fear the supply will dry up. Consequently we reject these gifts and manufacture substitutes. These inferior replicas are at least ours, because we made them. And our creatures wouldn’t dare drop us or hurt us . . . would they?
Reality, it is true, has a lot to answer for, so on the whole we make sure we don’t live there. We cannot control reality, but we can control our fantasies. Except our fantasies don’t exist; so we’re not really controlling anything at all. But the illusion of control is deeply reassuring. And the price we pay for this reassurance is unimaginable.