Facing the Fear

An Actor's Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright

Bella Merlin

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780017259
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Stage fright has the power to drive actors away from the stage for months, years, and even a lifetime. It is a monster that can affect any actor at any time - but it is also a challenge that can be met.

In Facing the Fear - the first book of its kind written specifically for actors - performer, author and teacher Bella Merlin draws on her own and other actors' personal experiences to examine:

• The internal and external roots of stage fright, and how it manifests itself both psychologically and physiologically
• The complex relationship between the actor and the audience, and how it contributes to stage fright
• The cognitive processes of learning, storing and retrieving lines, and practical strategies to help
• The essential principles for building a healthy, fear-free rehearsal environment
• The techniques that actors can employ to develop their own practices, from tips on physical wellbeing to performance strategies

Insightful, empowering and always reassuring, Facing the Fear is a book for any actor: for those who are experiencing or have previously suffered from stage fright, as well as for those who want to be fully prepared in case that day ever comes. It provides all the tools actors need to understand, confront and ultimately overcome stage fright and its effects, thereby regaining control over their lives and careers. (And it might just save a fortune in psychotherapist's fees!)

It's also valuable reading for any teacher, director or stage manager working closely with actors, and a fascinating insight for anyone interested in what actors go through.

'An utterly engrossing book about confronting one of the most fundamental aspects of being an actor - fear.' Antony Sher

1

What is Stage Fright?

The Role of the Fear

‘It is… a monster which hides in its foul corner without revealing itself, but you know that it is there… He can come at any time, in any form. The dark shadow of fear.’¹⁷

Laurence Olivier

1. What is Stage Fright?

‘Know the enemy’

Sun Tzu (the famous Chinese general from 6 BCE) was a fearsome military strategist. ‘Know the enemy and know yourself,’ he wrote, ‘and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.’¹⁸ The last thing we want when we’re on the stage is to feel as if we’re in peril. So our task in this chapter is to get to know our enemy – and that inevitably involves us getting to know our self. After all, the enemy of stage fright lurks inside our own brain and body: we ourselves are its Trojan Horse. It’s a mind-expanding journey that we’re about to embark upon. The terrain is treacherous. The enemy cunning. So, like generals in a war room, we’d better lay out a battle plan as clearly as we can.

There are three key assessments that we need to make: (1) How is the war waged? (2) Who is our enemy? And (3) What are our own capabilities? The bulk of this chapter falls into three sections that deal with each of these assessments.

In the first section – A Bird’s Eye View of the Processes of Stage Fright – we address how the war is waged. We lay out the battle plan and examine the enemy’s tactics, asking the questions: how do we experience stage fright? What provokes it, given our DNA (i.e. the evolutionary factors that we might not know)? What provokes it, given our industry (i.e. the external factors that we can’t control)? What provokes it, given our temperaments (i.e. the internal factors that we might be able to change)?

In the second section – The Nature of Fear – we study more closely who our enemy is. As if we’re placing figures onto the battle plan, we encounter the ‘fear family’ of worry, anxiety, stress and depression. After all, once we get to know our enemy, we can start to know our self.

The third section – The Nature of Us – is all about getting to know our self and our own capabilities, so that in a hundred battles we shall never be in peril. This involves us unpacking the basic paradox of acting: i.e. how can we be fully engrossed in the role while at the same time being attentive to all the technical stuff? As actors, we need this level of ‘dual consciousness’: indeed, we can’t do our work without it. We have to be able to lose ourselves in the passionate kiss with Antony, whilst also making sure that we’re in the light, that we’re facing downstage, and that our Cleopatra headdress doesn’t fall off. Yet when stage fright hits us, it’s like an ambush. It can take us by surprise and with such a force, that our consciousness is no longer dual: instead, it shatters into a thousand shards. So in The Nature of Us, we look at what consciousness really means, in terms of who are we, and what makes us who we are. Then we may be able to understand what’s happening when our consciousness fragments during stage fright.

The very thought of facing our stage fright can be daunting. Human beings are complex and there’s a lot in this chapter to understand. So we’ll end the chapter with a note on courage. In fact, we focus on two people whose courage turned their stage fright into something that could benefit us all: the pioneering actor-trainers, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg.

By the end of this chapter, we should have some clear knowledge about how the enemy operates, who exactly they are, and who we are as their opponents. We’ll then be in a stronger position with the following chapters to create some strategies for facing the fear and embracing the foe.

Assessment 1: A Bird’s Eye View
of the Processes of Stage Fright

Our first battle tactic is to recognise the two ways in which our stage fright manifests itself: physiologically and psychologically.

Physiological manifestations of stage fright

It’s not difficult to recognise when our body is suffering an attack of stage fright. Our muscles tense. Our knees tremble. Our heart pounds. Our hands grow clammy. Butterflies batter about our stomach and we think we need the loo. Then out we go onto the stage – and just when we need our spittle to speak, our mouth dries up like the Sahara Desert. We suddenly feel light-headed, maybe even to the point of vertigo. In fact, when Anthony Sher was playing Iago in Japan for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he suffered ‘small but alarming losses of balance’ which threatened to tip him off the stage and he thought he was in an earthquake!¹⁹

All these physiological gymnastics are the body adapting to what it knows to be an important situation. The trouble is that our body doesn’t actually need to do all that preparation: it’s out of kilter with the task in hand. After all, it’s not an earthquake and we’re not really under attack. And what happens when our physiological response is out of kilter is that we find it hard to concentrate on what we’re supposed to be doing. Indeed, fractured concentration is a large part of the other incarnation of stage fright: the psychological manifestation.

Psychological manifestations of stage fright

Which comes first: the physiological manifestations or the psychological manifestations? It’s not always clear. My own stage fright in The Permanent Way began totally out of the blue with the physiological manifestations, and then – like an unstoppable avalanche – the psychological manifestations followed. Thereon in, the dialogue between the physical and the psychological was self-perpetuating. I’d think about getting nervous and my body would come up with the signs – and then I’d feel nervous, and my body would show more signs. And so it went on… Which is actually perfectly normal, given that as human beings we’re psychophysical. In other words, whatever happens in our body inextricably impacts our psyche, and whatever’s going on in our psyche inextricably affects our body. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of psychological stage fright is that it’s in our heads: it’s us creating our own distress, and that makes us feel as if we’re going crazy. So what triggers this strange self-sabotage?

The basic trigger for psychological stage fright is usually some kind of dislocation from the script. An interfering thought suddenly pops into our heads, and we find ourselves thinking about something other than just performing. And this can be the first warning sign of a more disruptive fracture in our consciousness. Here’s how: in everyday life, we have two ‘selves’ which normally collaborate very effectively so that we can go about our daily business. These two selves are known as the ‘functioning self’ and the ‘observing self’.²⁰

The functioning self is the part of us that gets on with the task in hand. It enables us to live happily during a performance in our dual existence of kissing Antony while finding the light, facing downstage, and holding on to our headdress.

The observing self deals with any necessary adjustments. It responds with split-second timing to the coughing fit on the fifth row (if it’s theatre); it adapts our performance from the long-shot to the mid-shot to the close-up (if it’s film); it picks up the asp that just fell off the divan without interrupting the dialogue. And, at its best, our observing self is our invaluable ally. Yet at its worst, our observing self becomes a self-sabotaging demon, watching us objectively with an evil smirk. And, when psychological stage fright kicks in, that demon starts to create all kinds of unhelpful scenarios.

Sometimes in those scenarios we become overwhelmingly aware of our own body. Actions that we normally execute without even thinking – walking or sitting or picking up a cup – become trembly and self-conscious. As the beleaguered actress Nina bewails in Chekhov’s The Seagull, ‘I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know how to stand, I couldn’t control my voice.’²¹ With psychological stage fright, we become ‘helpless witnesses to our own malfunctioning’.²²

*

Clearly, stage fright is not very pleasant – either physiologically or psychologically. Yet this is the first step in knowing our enemy: registering what it feels like when they’ve embarked on an attack. The next step is to look at why the attack happens in the first place. Why do we find the career that we love becoming the experience that we dread? One of the answers to this question lies in our evolution. So let’s go right back some 200,000 years…

Evolutionary provokers of stage fright

Picture this for a moment. We’re sitting in the mouth of our cave. Out there in the darkness, we see – or maybe only sense – blinking eyes staring back at us in silence. Far from being a rapt audience listening to our recounting of a brave day’s hunting, those eyes belong to creatures fathoming out whether or not to eat us. And the thought of being devoured triggers the most ancient part of our brain to spring into survival-mode action. That ancient part is the tiny, almond-shaped amygdala. So – in the briefest of briefs – what does the amygdala do?

Well, picture this for a moment. It’s another late-night scenario. A nervous young sentinel is sitting at the outpost, surrounded by darkness. With hyper-attentive vigilance, he suddenly sees a spark in the dark, and he rushes back to the camp shouting, ‘Alert! Alert! We’re under attack!’ ‘Nonsense,’ says the commander, knowingly. ‘That was just Carruthers lighting a cigarette.’ That twitchy sentinel is a bit like our amygdala. (‘The Vigilante’, I call him in Chapter 3.) It responds more quickly to a potential threat than the brain regions that emerged later in our evolution (the regions connected to our more sophisticated consciousness). So whether or not we actually need to fear a situation, the amygdala sends fear signals to our body and brain. What this can mean if we’re actors in the throes of performing a scene is that the amygdala senses all those eyes watching us (‘devouringly’) in the dark and it triggers our fear. Yet there’s nothing to be afraid of: there’s nothing out there to devour us. It’s only the audience and the ushers, or the camera crew and the director, watching us supportively as we do our work. Strange as it may seem, the fear of being watched is hardwired into our brain. Which means that when it comes to keeping cool under pressure, ‘Virtually by design, crowds are destined to make most of us want to flee the vicinity in terror.’²³

But as actors we can’t flee. We’re trapped – in the wings just about to make an entrance. Or on the stage in the middle of a scene. Or in front of the cameras with vast amounts of money dependent on our performance. And we’re not just trapped by the fact that we’ve got a job to do: the setting itself can hem us in. A traverse stage (with the audience on both sides), a thrust stage (with the audience on three sides), an arena (with the audience on all sides), or a film set (with crew, grips, floor managers, make-up teams and extras everywhere)… – You can see just how terrifying these environments can be when our primitive survival-mode kicks in. All eyes are on us and there’s no place to shelter. But even if we could escape, our normal coping strategies are on hold, as we’re not ‘ourselves’: we’re in the given circumstances of a fictional character. And our job requires that we behave in ways appropriate to that character. It’s the unavoidable ‘schizophrenia’ innate in our profession. And the very fact that, in the process of doing our job, we’re consciously dislocated from our own, personal behaviour patterns can be pretty traumatic.

*

When you consider some of these innate, evolutionary fears that are built into our experience of public performance, stage fright is suddenly perfectly understandable and highly forgivable. And that’s just the start. That’s just the evolutionary stuff. What about the external realities attached to our profession that can potentially provoke our fear?

External provokers of stage fright

There are certain facts of the industry that can stir up our nerves. In fact, a degree of low-level anxiety underpins our whole profession, so we need to keep our wits about us. Here are just a couple of red flags.

Loss of control over our careers

When we sign up for a life as an actor, we essentially surrender our agency over our lives. (There’s a reason why our agents are called ‘agents’.) Unless we have a strong entrepreneurial streak – like Kenneth Branagh or Kevin Spacey – or the wherewithal to make our own work, we’re dependent on our agents, managers, directors and casting directors, and a whole host of other figures in production, commerce and administration to determine our personal destiny. If we’re not careful, we begin to feel like a leaf on a breeze, fluttering wherever the next gust takes us. We don’t book a vacation – just in case the phone rings and we get an audition. We commit to a family reunion – and, sure enough, the phone rings and we’ve got an audition. And as researchers into happiness have found, when we lose autonomy over our lives, the feeling in extreme circumstances can be devastating.²⁴

We might be able to deal with the loss of autonomy – of when, where and whether the jobs come up – if it weren’t for the fact that there are so many variables in how the roles are actually cast. Which takes us to our second external provoker of stage fright: the vagaries of casting.

The vagaries of casting

The employment statistics in the acting industry have never been particularly encouraging. And it’s not just a matter of money. Any of us who have endured bouts of unemployment know that an actor without a job is like a soul without a body. Not knowing what to do with ourselves or how to channel our creative instincts when we’re out of work naturally makes us nervous and unhappy. ‘Inactivity and the feeling of helplessness are the greatest enemies of happiness.’²⁵ And our helplessness is exacerbated by employers not necessarily knowing what type of person they want for a role until a particular actor walks through the casting-room door and they suddenly go, ‘Yes – that’s it!’ We want to be versatile, so that we can make ourselves available for a wide range of jobs. Yet, at the same time, our agents – the major gatekeepers into our employment opportunities – have to categorise us in order to work m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. What is Stage Fright?
• 2. How Did We Get Here?
• 3. How Do You Remember All Those Lines?
• 4. What Goes On in the Rehearsal Room?
• 5. How Do We Develop Good Practices?
• Debrief
• Compendium of Terms
• Confidence Checklist
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Copyright