Stage fright

“ This is called stage-fright, and it is never cured; it has ruined more brilliant careers than the critics have. You shake your head and appeal to your former triumphs. Don't deceive yourself; I know the machinery of the stage well, and how artificial thunder and lightning are manufactured. At every performance you gain a triumph ”

“ The persons of a drama are protected by footlights, by the stage doorkeeper, not to mention grease paint and scalps by an eminent artiste; but the characters in a novel are thrust defenseless into a rude world, with many reporters about. In a page fright, worse even than stage fright, their only comfort is that absence of body which is their alternative to your great gift,—presence of mind. ”

“ The stage dancer does not have this difficulty with her voice, and if trained right while acquiring her art should never be subjected to the bugaboo of fear. But I am going to lay down some general rules here for the prevention and control of stage fright that will give you confidence and also serve to instruct you how to act if the worst does happen and nervousness gets the best of you. ”

“ I still had stage fright, but not the fright that paralyzes, only the kind that drives one wild. This is bad enough, but it is preferable to the other sort. It makes one do too much, but at any rate, one does something. ”

“ Lady Baring is at home to-night, and in the big, bare rooms outside dancing is going on, and in the smaller rooms, tiny tragedies and comedies are being enacted by amateurs, who, oh, wondrous tale! do know their parts and speak them, albeit no stage "proper" has been prepared for them. Perhaps that is why stage-fright is not for them—a stage as big as "all the world" leaves actors very free. ”

“ Published by T. Tegg.—The interior of another booth-theatre; the play is interrupted; the only performer on the stage is thrown into consternation, and the whole of the audience are dispersing in terror at an unexpected intruder. A royal Bengal tiger has made his escape from an adjoining show, and is bounding through the [192] canvas walls of the theatrical booth, threatening to descend plump into the auditorium. The effect on the frightened playgoers may be well imagined. Some are prostrate with terror; one man is down on his knees and cannot move for fright; ladies are fainting ”

“ From my place in the theater I saw you stand, slender and alone, before that mighty audience, while those divine notes hushed them to breathlessness and lifted them to ecstasy. When the last strain had died away, there came a wondering silence: and then an outbreak like storm-waves suddenly thundering upon an entranced shore. Above that enormous tumult I saw your dark eyes sparkle in a smile from your pure face; all the multitude was on its feet, and men were struggling to cast garlands on the stage before you. ”

“ The light would be turned on, and somebody with an ashen face would appear upon the stage, shouting that all was in order and that there was no fire, and the music, trembling and halting, would begin playing something wildly merry—but they would be deaf to everything—they would be throttling, trampling, and beating the heads of the women, demolishing their ingenious, cunning headdresses. ”

“ He understood; but instead of simply resuming where he had left off, from force of habit he first gave the leader's usual three sharp taps upon his music desk, and then—so queer a thing is an audience—those people, brought to their feet in an agony of terror, of fire, panic, and sudden death by a woman's cry, now at that familiar tap, tap, tap, broke here and there into laughter. By sixes and sevens, then by tens and twenties, they sheepishly seated themselves, only turning their heads with pitying looks while the ushers removed the unconscious woman. ”

“ The time, I hope, is at hand, when an audience in a theatre, who catch a manager cheating them out of their fair allowance of fresh air, will not sit and gasp, and inhale destruction till eleven P.M., and then rush wildly to the street for relief. They will stop the play; they will tear up the benches, if necessary; they will throw things on the stage; they will knock a hole in the wall; they will have the means of breathing, or perish in the struggle. But at present people do not know what they are doing when they inhale poison. ”

“ Instead of death-like stillness or desperate fortitude, preparing for inevitable fate, or hurrying from it with panic-fear at some uncertain opening, they have set themselves in a picturesque situation, to meet it under every disadvantage, playing off their antics like a family of tumblers at a fair, and exhibiting the horrid grimaces, the vulgar rage, cowardice, and impatience of the most wretched actors on a stage. ”

“ The consternation and terror of the poor people, whose all was destroying, is not to be described: the women shrieking, threw themselves off the stage into the pit, as the smoke and flames terrified them from attempting to get out any other way, though there was a door behind the stage. ”

“ With the dropping of the curtain a door in the rear had been opened by the performers, fleeing for their lives and battling to escape from the devouring element fast hemming them in on every side. The draft thus caused transformed the stage in one second from a dark, gloomy, smoke concealed scene of chaos into a seething volcano. With a great puff the mass of flame swept out over the auditorium, a withering blast of death. Before it the vast throng broke and fled.
Doors, windows, hallways, fire escapes—all were jammed in a moment with struggling humanity, fighting for life. ”

“ They were told how to rush wildly on with a fierce, tumultuous yell; how to crowd together at the back of the stage, and, standing there, surging backward and forward like an angry sea, brandish their weapons, and scowl menacingly upon the opposing myrmidons of the law, until, at length, their sullen murmurs deepening into a roar of savage hate, they would break upon the wall of steel before them, and sweep it from their path, as pent-up waters, bursting their bonds, bear down some puny barrier. ”

“ At last, out of the void rise the shapes of the masses, the imprisoned masses who have been betrayed by violence and by the woman who deserted them and cast her lot with violence. They move in a great circle of towering shadows that seem to hang in the emptiness of the sky, as they pass across the dome at the back of the stage. The guilt of the masses, the guilt of the individual, the guilt of the woman—they have filled the air with recrimination. ”

“ It's always safe, always just in the theatre, just on the stage, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam ... and the best sort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can't remember one single thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can't ever push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at the audience gets too strong ... ”

“ Sometimes when watching a work of common quality, a painful idea comes into one's mind, and we wonder how people, compelled to see it night after night perhaps for half-a-year, can endure the strain. What, for instance, must be the sufferings of the conductor or of a member of the orchestra at a successful second-rate musical comedy; of a stage manager compelled for months, one after another, to direct a brainless farce? ”

“ The rehearsals were exhausting in the extreme, the heat was unnatural, the walk far too long, and, well, to be frank, I had not nearly enough to eat. My anxiety was growing hourly, my strength began to fail, and at the last rehearsals, white as wax from weakness, I had to be carried up the stairs to the stage. Having such a quick study, requiring but few rehearsals, I was from the fourth day ready at any moment to go on and play my part. ”

“ It is the very height of absurdity to see an amateur company on a stage, and particularly on the stage of a theatre. In the midst of the most solemn tragedy one is compelled to laugh at them. If they have on tights and trunks they try to get their hands into side pockets, and if they carry swords the weapon gets tangled in their legs, and ten to one after the blade has left its scabbard, the wearer will be unable to get it back again. ”

“ The stage storm still bursts upon the drama from time to time; the theatre is still visited in due course by its rainy and tempestuous season; and thunder and lightning are, as much as in Addison's time, among the favourite devices of our playwrights, "put in practice to fill the minds of an audience with terror." The terror may not be quite of the old kind, but still it does well enough. ”

“ I could not see the people for one thing—at all events, not those beyond the third row of stalls. The blaze of light surrounding one on the stage, and the dimness of the rest of the house, give the audience a shadowy and ghost-like appearance, and make it impossible to see more than a general mass of white faces. As I never noticed the “hundreds upon hundreds of glaring eyes,” they did not trouble me, and I let ‘em glare. The most withering glance in the world won’t crush a blind man. ”

“ He did so and said there were forty making the disturbance. It was impossible to hear a word of the play. The curtain came down for a minute, but I went round and told the actors to go on playing to the end, even if not a word could be heard. The police, hearing the uproar, began to file in, but I thought the disturbers might tire themselves out if left alone, or be satisfied with having made their protest, and I asked them to go outside but stay within call in case of any attempt being made to injure the players or the stage. ”

“ Bad enunciation and noisy music often combine to make the words from the stage inaudible to the audience. Why an old farmer should arrive down a country lane to a blare of trumpets is unintelligible: why a man should plot murder to a valse, or a woman die to slow music, is a conundrum, but such is the fashion on the stage. One sometimes sits through a performance without hearing any of what ought to be the most thrilling lines. ”

“ The spectators, if they think of it at all, must realise that throughout the whole trivial performance their emotions are being basely played upon, and yet that they are being treated with an insulting precaution which would be more in place in a lunatic asylum than in a gathering of presumably responsible men and women. In the end one is made to feel how far more purifying and ennobling than this is the spectacle of absolute nakedness, even on the stage, yes, even on the stage. ”

“ So they look down upon human life, of which they are ignorant. They see the exits and entrances of the players, something that they suspect is meant to be kept from them (for they think they are always liable to be imposed upon) : the petty pageant of an hour ends with each scene long before the catastrophe, and the tragedy of life is turned to farce under their eyes. These people laugh loud at a pantomime, and are delighted with clowns and pantaloons. They pay no attention to any thing else. The stage-boxes exist in contempt of the stage and common sense. ”

“ The stage was a mass of flames, and the smoke was filling the auditorium and rushing into the corridors. He hurried to the front main entrance of the dress-circle, and there found a mass of men and women shrieking, shouting and crowding madly down upon the living mass below. For a while the passage seemed blocked by a human barrier which could neither move of itself nor give way to pressure from above. Burly men and weak women seemed alike powerless in that dense throng, and to aggravate the panic, people at the turn of the stairs kept calling, “Go back! ”

“ We see there real human beings a few feet from us; we see in the melodrama how the villain approaches his victim from behind with a dagger; we feel indignation and anger: and yet we have not the slightest desire to jump up on the stage and stay his arm. The artificial setting of the stage, the lighted proscenium before the dark house, have removed the whole action from the world which is connected with our own deeds. The consciousness of unreality, which the theater has forced on us, is the condition for our dramatic interest in the events presented. ”

“ Madness became on a sudden the fashionable disease. In the salons a host of young women found occupation in playing the part of Nina, and some of them appeared to have worked themselves into a condition bordering on lunacy. The critics essayed in vain to combat this ridiculous infatuation. They pronounced the subject monstrous, the libretto insipid, the music detestable, and loudly bewailed the decay of art upon the stage. They might have saved their paper and ink. The public continued to applaud and to weep, and the receipts of the Comédie-Italienne to increase. ”

“ I trailed about after Desdemona—picked up the fatal handkerchief—spoke a line here and there as Shakespeare wills she should, and bided my time as all Emilias must. Now I had noticed that many Emilias when they gave the alarm—cried out their "Murder! Murder!" against all the noise of the tolling bells, and came back upon the stage spent, and without voice or breath to finish their big scene with, and people thought them weak in consequence. A long hanging bar of steel is generally used for the alarm, and blows struck upon it send forth a vibrating clangor that completely fills a theatre. ”

“ The Englishman's wife sets up a tea basket; friends and relatives are sent out for sandwiches and "something to wash 'em down." At this stage of the siege one becomes a mere machine. There is no attempt at acting. It is now a mechanical perfection. When the scenic effects refuse to act on cues or "anticipate" the same, or the supers jumble and everybody grows cross and "on edge," one shudders to realize that the opening night is close at hand. One hopes and prays things will not go like this to-morrow night. There is consolation in the old adage: "A poor dress rehearsal—a good first night." ”