Lyn Gardner writes in the Guardian Unlimited that not all right on the night. The piece discusses stage fright and how some actors have overcome it . . . of particular interest is Daryl Hannah’s success with hypnosis in overcoming her own stage anxiety.
While the article does not intend to, it over simplifies some of the issues related to stage fright and creates an impression of it being debilitating and scary and having such a sense of failure that so many actors and acresses must hide it.
The pulse starts racing, the skin turns clammy and pale, the stomach churns, the mind goes blank, pains develop in the chest, the limbs begin to shake and panic sets in. It has all the hallmarks of a heart attack – but in fact it is only a bad case of stage fright, or what Ian Holm calls "the actor’s industrial illness".
Well that certainly makes stage fright sound awful . . . and there certainly are folks who have communication anxiety to the point that it can be debilitating as that. However, even Ian Holm would not have it quite that bad. People who come close to having heart attacks from performance anxiety do not normally become professional performers. Rather they go into areas where they minimize their chances of being required to go on stage or address large audiences.
Yes, there are actors who experience nerves and the like but certainly not to the extend I’ve seen with folks who are not professional performers and the anxiety levels they experience.
Holm certainly knows about stage fright firsthand. In 1976, during previews of a production of The Iceman Cometh, he was so overcome by stage fright that he walked off stage and didn’t return for another eight years.
Ian Holm is an exception that proves the rule. Notice that his stage fright came about due to a stage rather than a film performance (the nature of the beast is very different) and that he walked off and did not return . . . he sought out alternative life tasks to avoid the need to appear in a live performance on stage.
There certainly are screen actors who have difficulty with stage performance, the two venues require very different performance and preparation styles (I have worked on stage and in television and know the difference).
Holm is not alone in being crippled by stage fright. Almost all actors suffer it to a lesser or greater degree, and most agree that some level of nerves is essential to giving a good performance.
Stage fright should not be confused with performance anticipation which also causes physiological changes. A number of folks misread what their body is experiencing as fright when it is actually a form of anticipation. It is inappropriate to assume all pre-performance jitters or energy is fright. I’ve worked with folks for this sort of issue and know whereof I speak (as both a certified and experienced hypnotist and as a professionally trained actor and director with undergraduate and graduate degrees in theatre, I’ve a lot of experience on the stage, off the stage, and working with those who must put on the greasepaint and get on stage).
Granted, when a person does have stage fright, the real deal, it can be a very powerfully negative experience and there certainly are folks for whom they’ve had to fight the experience just to get on stage let alone survive in a career. Most folks just give up and go hide from public performance altogether so the few who have had severe cases of stage fright or performance anxiety who struggle and eventually win are to be commended, albeit their struggle was an unfortunate experience to go through.
Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness are just some of the great names of the past who have been badly afflicted by stage fright, but they never let it stand in the way of their careers. Others, such as Holm, have been less lucky. David Warner, who plays King Lear at Chichester next month, was away from the stage for more than 25 years after suffering terrible stage fright. A life that might have been spent playing the great classical roles was instead eked out in American mini-series. And Roy Marsden, TV’s Inspector Dalgleish, withdrew suddenly from a production of Calderon de la Barca’s The Mayor of Zalamea in Liverpool last year, citing "personal conflicts with stage fright". He simply couldn’t bear to go on..
No one really has to go through that sort of pain. There really are some wonderful methods to deal with stage fright, performance anxiety, and communication apprehension that are straightforward, simple, and very effective.
Of course, treatment for stage fright is available, and Daryl Hannah resorted to hypnotherapy to try and cure her nerves before taking to the London stage in The Seven Year Itch. It worked.
She "resorted to" hypnotherapy? Makes it sound like a last ditch effort and appeal to the devil. Far from it, trance based modalities have been proven far more effective for dealing with performance and communication apprehension than any other treatment. Rather than being a person’s last ditch effort, hypnotherapy or autogenic relaxation training with progressive desensitization or parts therapy should be the first line of defence as they have been proven in study after study to be the single most effective treatments for anxiety of this type. The actors described in the article could have been helped so much earlier and they could have enjoyed their stage experiences fully rather than dreading them or throwing up or contemplating suicide or drinking or drugging themselves or just plan running away to escape. Stage fright need not be a serious issue. People with serious communication or performance apprehension can be helped and helped very powerfully so.
But even though the affliction is accepted as something that goes with the job, most actors are less willing to talk about it in public than they would be to talk about a bad dose of haemorrhoids. Agents seem unwilling to admit that any of their clients might ever have suffered from stage fright for fear of jeopardising their future work prospects. "I throw up almost every time before I go on stage," said one actor who preferred not to be named. "I am not alone. I have friends who have given up acting, it has got so bad. "But you would never admit it in public. It would be like saying you were a steeplejack who was afraid of heights. People would see you as a risk – it would be another reason not to give you the job."
Most actors do not have performance anxiety, many have quite the opposite. For those who have serious performance apprehension, they should seek out competent and qualified help.
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