This Much Is True

I’ve worked with some fine actors in my time and one of the greatest is Vanessa Redgrave. What I particularly admire is how she is able to combine extraordinary technical ability with complete truth. She doesn’t act; she just is. That’s rare. And she startles you. When I was working with her in 1988 in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, we rehearsed in a church in Chelsea. One day she was magical: everything seemed to gel and even the light around her danced. It was an extraordinary experience and we all felt blessed to have observed truly great acting — but there was only us, there was no audience. She was always good after that, but I don’t think she ever quite caught that light, that sparkle, that was in the rehearsal room at that parish church again. It was pure blinding magic.

I think that you see how you want to appear on the stage. And I don’t mean physically: what I mean, rather, is that somehow you ‘see’ what you want to do with your character, how you want her to be. What is her reality? You glimpse it, distantly, and as you rehearse, and with the help of your colleagues and your director, and the costume department and the make-up artist, and so on, gradually, it all feeds into your ‘being’. Then the creation, your character’s being, starts slowly and imperceptibly to take root, and to be there for you to step into on the first night, or whenever the first audience appears.

That’s why I hate it when people ask to watch a rehearsal. Sometimes directors say, ‘Oh, I’ve asked a few people to come in to see how we’re going.’ I can’t bear it, because a performance is a fragile butterfly of a thing — and it has to be coaxed and nourished and soothed. Exposure too early is scary and frightening, because an actor’s nature is to perform — that is what we do. And that’s how we think of ourselves — we are the performers and you are the audience. When we see an audience, we will perform, but if we’re not ready to deliver our performance, then something phony, invented and inorganic is risked being laid onto the fragile structure that is slowly coming into being. (I’m talking about acting for the stage here, of course, and theatre is where I feel at home, and where I feel I know what I’m doing. Acting for film is another beast altogether.)

My stage fright has only increased as I’ve got older. The expectations of the audience have become so much higher and I don’t want to let them down. I now have a bucket in the wings because I am so often sick before I go on stage. I’m not alone in this regard: Maggie Smith told me in Australia, when she was performing the Alan Bennett monologues in Sydney, how terribly nervous she gets, to the point of vomiting.

When Stephen Fry ran away after everything went wrong with Cell Mates, I knew just how he was feeling. I tried to tell him that all would be well and that he shouldn’t be so hard on himself. I know that feeling of despair, of feeling trapped, that horrible panic, and I know that he suffers with an even deeper kind of depression. I worried that he might kill himself. This calls forth the entirely sensible question: why do we do it to ourselves? And keep doing it? The thing is that once you’re on stage, you’re on, and when it works there is no feeling like it; to inhabit your part and to hear the audience gasp and know that they are catching their breath because of you.

The dread of forgetting one’s lines, I think, is the basis of all anxiety in the theatre, and it has been for me. As I get older, it feels ever more perilous — even thinking about it now makes me feel nervous.

In 1979, I was in the Snoo Wilson play Flaming Bodies at the ICA with Julie Walters. I had an eight-page monologue and I just couldn’t remember it. My panic built up during rehearsals and by the afternoon of our first night, I was in a state of terror. I told Julie that I knew I couldn’t do it and I wasn’t going to go on. She tried her best to soothe me: ‘Don’t worry, Miriam. You’ll remember it. It’ll be all right on the night. You’ll be fine.’

‘No, I fucking won’t,’ I wailed. ‘It’s hopeless!’ And I ran out of the ICA, hailed a black cab on the Mall and jumped into it. Julie was hot on my heels and she jumped straight in after me. We then spent the next few hours driving around London as the taxi-meter clicked up and she desperately tried to talk me round. Poor Julie, it was early in her career and she must have been in flat despair. But I was adamant: I’d had days to think about it and I knew I couldn’t remember my monologue. On we drove until eventually we got the cabbie to stop somewhere and we went for a cup of tea. I didn’t do the performance that first night — but I did it on the second night and it was fine: I remembered that bloody monologue after all and survived to tell the tale. I believe Julie forgave me; I hope so.