Fright
I’m in a play. By someone else.
The countdown widget on my phone informs me that I’ll be back on stage in 30 days. Even though I’ve been performing for years now, this time very much feels like a first time, and the reason is: I didn’t write this show. I’m not directing it, I haven’t produced it, I haven’t been cobbling together press releases for uninterested outlets, and — bar a few social media posts — haven’t been burdened with doing the promo (which always makes me feel like a LinkedIn influencer bragging about maximising company expenditure by boiling half a chicken in the hotel kettle instead of claiming for a restaurant bill; “I’m hustling and I’m worthy, buy me”).
No, this is a play I noted last summer as a forthcoming Lace Market Theatre production, and I was hell-bent on auditioning for it. I even put reminders on my phone to check back for audition dates. Why? The play is Craig Warner’s stage adaptation of Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, one of those authors I became obsessed with as a teenager and reconstructed my entire brain chemistry around. There was no way I was going to miss auditioning for it.
Anyway, I missed it. Accepting an invite to read at a book event in Norwich made me feel like a king for a day but a fool the next; auditions turned out to be on the same evening. Long story short: there was to be another round of auditions, so I went along to those instead. Two hours later, while trying to decide between granolas in Sainsbury’s, I got a call to tell me I’d landed the role of Guy Haines, one of the leads.
I can’t tell you how long I stood staring at the granola after that. Me, in a play I didn’t write for myself? Acting? As a lead? I didn’t even start my theatre career writing things for myself. I wrote them for my Off-Off-Off-Broadway cohorts to perform as I watched from the tech desk.
I’d always loved performing, first bursting onto the scene as Dark Cloud in the nursery nativity. After finally being cast as a human child at the age of seven, I may have got cocky, and attended intermittent auditions for school plays, only to be shot down. But I came back big, as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady during my GCSE year, thus ending my time in Cyprus with a bang. But that was it. Drama was over, and acting was a thing I once enjoyed doing but couldn’t really do, not properly, not seriously. At uni, I heard tales of some of the horrible things that the Drama students were put through: group exercises, vocal warmups, invoking energy by moving limbs fluidly. That couldn’t be me. It reminded me of the one session I attended at an acting school for kids in Cyprus. In her 1950s bungalow, the teacher got us to reenact the Turkish invasion of 1974. I watched helplessly as children moaned and dragged themselves around her dark living room with feigned injuries and thought, ‘This feels a bit silly.’ So I pretended I’d been shot by a Turk and spent most of that session lying down dead.
It was only while watching my Off-Off-Off-Broadway pals on stage that I started to feel my old love pulling me back. Tentatively, I broached the idea one night of the three of us acting together. Encouraged by them, I wrote Peaceful. The show went on to be our biggest success, selling out and getting both rave reviews and extra performances, but it had the mother of all rocky starts. For a number of reasons, my return to the stage — acting as the villainous Mr Coburn — was a disaster. I wasn’t only discouraged, I almost walked off stage halfway through the show; I’d corpsed. No, I wasn’t lying down pretending to be a martyred Greek, I simply froze. We were under-rehearsed, and a wayward line totally threw me off, so I panicked. A situation I could once easily turn around became something totally insurmountable. I simply stood, for an eternity, hearing the breaths of our (thankfully) tiny first-night audience as everyone waited for me to act. It’s a moment I relive often, and one I can’t help recalling every time I prepare to go on stage, particularly on opening nights. That sense of dread haunts me.
Over the years, I’ve been able to push it back, so that it’s got smaller and smaller. Although I occasionally let it get the better of me, causing me to stumble with my first solo shows, I can now recall it objectively, as a bad memory and nothing more. It only defines that experience, that troubled time, not me as a performer. I know I’m able to get on stage and have fun with whatever I’m doing. I’ve learned how to draw on my experience and empathy to convey a character’s emotions without going method or mimicking a swaying tree or being so tied up in myself that I lose the thread.
When helping a PhD student with research on her thesis about a year ago, I tried to explain the feeling of performing for a live audience. In my folklore storytelling, I’m simply a version of me sharing a great old tale with friends. I can comment on things and feel grounded in this reality while also invoking the atmosphere and emotions contained in whatever story I’m telling. In narrative shows where I’m playing a character, my head is split in two: part of me is conveying the emotions of my character, grounded in their reality and responding to those around them, while part of me stays aware of my real circumstances, my audience, my lines, where I am in the play, what’s coming next, what to do if something goes awry. (I’m a bi Cypriot migrant, inhabiting liminal spaces is no biggie.)
In the grand tradition of everything else in my life, acting sets off my Impostor Syndrome. The fact that I’ve never had official training means I’ll always feel like a fraud, because that’s how most of us are wired. But then I mentally shake myself. I do have experience. I’ve had the highs and lows. I’ve had sell-out shows and single-digit audiences. I’ve been slated in reviews and praised. Ignored and nominated for awards. Like a ‘proper’ performer.
And damn it, I enjoy it.
Strangers on a Train is on at Nottingham’s Lace Market Theatre from 27th May to 1st June — tickets available now.
This is great! Very sadly I'm preoccupied on those days but if it falls through I will seek tickets!
Break a leg!