STAGE-FRIGHT

I do try to be charming. I do try to be gracious. More often than not I fail, but I do at least continue to try.

However feebly.

For about five years around about the cusp of the century, I was involved in what many people might regard as being the rather weird world of AmDram, which can seem to be an unusual world that seems to be populated by similar types of people no matter which of the many societies you happen to get involved with. From the “old fusspot” to the “thinks she ought to be a superstar”, they’re usually all there in one form or another, but they’re usually mostly quite lovely folk just trying to put on a show and get beyond their own inner fears.

Actually, I really can’t criticise the one I got involved in. After all, I made some long-standing friends and met the beloved through my involvement in the place, but in the end it drove me so mad and sucked so much of the effort and energy out of me that I had to allow myself to drift away, although I remain in a kind of “high orbit” in my relationship with it and occasionally our paths cross for whatever reasons.

I didn’t join up to do any of that prancing about in tights or “shouting in the evenings” as Patrick Troughton so memorably put it. Whilst I had enjoyed doing such things at school, the crushing self-consciousness I developed in later years meant that my chances of ever wanting to do such things again were very unlikely. I joined up on the understanding that my “career” would be strictly backstage, lurking in the shadows like the foul-faced Phantom of the Opera that I am, but without quite so much of the madness, I hoped. I started off building a prop carcass of a dead cow and eventually moved on to some quite abstract notions of set design and building, which was where most of the energy went, I suspect.

Who was it said that it’s a small world until you have to paint it…?

I also worked on the bar.

A lot.

I liked working the bar. It’s still pretty much the only time I’ve ever found myself in a room full of relative strangers and felt that I had something to contribute that didn’t leave me feeling awkward or intimidated or wanting to run screaming from the room because I couldn’t think of anything useful to actually say. This is when I also discovered that the “one for yourself” “soft” drink option of more than half-a-dozen cans of the shiny new drink known as “Red Bull” was not the wisest option for an insomniac to choose, but that’s another story...

However, one of the more persistent performers of that particular theatrical society did once (and only once) catch me at a weak moment and persuade me to strut around on a stage pretending to be a prison officer for the run of some Jeffrey Archer nonsense. To be honest, I suspect that they were struggling to find anyone else who looked reasonable in a uniform who was prepared to play such a minor role, but I caved under pressure and then found that I loathed every wretched minute of being on-stage, although I will admit to having enjoyed the last night party which, in many ways, changed my life forever.

Eventually.

But that’s also another story….

All I remember of it now is the gut-wrenching fear of standing in the wings waiting to go on and knowing that the one stupid first line of deathless prose as written by Mr Archer which I was supposed to say had left my mind forever, seemingly never to return, and then quaking through the entire 45 minutes I had to spend in the presence of that terrifying unseen audience for seven nights on the trot.

Loathsome.

You hear stories, of course, that even the greatest of our classical actors could be found retching into a bucket before they walked onto a stage, but somehow that really doesn’t help when you are quaking and shaking with fear and know with absolute certainty that you are the most appalling creature ever to be ridiculous enough to think you could entertain your fellow human beings using only your own stupid body as your tool. Many, of course, are cured by “Doctor Theatre”, but many more spend years in a heightened state of tension that only drink or drugs or outrageous behaviour and an obsession with bizarre superstitions seem to be able to keep in check.

Boo!

Because I was only in Act One, I refused point blank to spend the rest of my evening just hanging around for what I saw as the self-congratulatory nonsense of the “curtain call” and buggered off home. This was, I suppose, considered to be rather bad form, but I had a long way to go and a job to do, and if anyone had taken me up on it, I’d’ve just whistled at them in the dressing-room and burbled on about “Macbeth” a lot. That would quite probably have got them into such a frenzy that I suspect that they’d have been glad to see the back of me and my lack of graciousness and charm.

This all came flooding back recently as one of the friends I met there had a birthday dinner and I got invited along. Granted, when I accepted the invitation I kind of assumed from the wording of the invite that it was going to be an intimate dinner for four or six, but when I realised that it was likely to be something of a larger affair, I managed to ascertain that the numbers weren’t going to be too vast (fifteen, I believe) and thought that I’d got myself into the headspace where I could cope.

Then I had a panic attack as I walked in the door and it took a good twenty minutes for me to calm down enough to attempt anything approaching “charm” or “grace” again. Oh well… Perhaps nobody else noticed. Perhaps they just thought that I was just being my usual “strange” self (insofar as if they even noticed me at all). Perhaps this sort of thing possibly explains why I don’t go out much, but, whatever’s happening, I’m beginning to think that only I could get stage-fright before having a meal in a restaurant.