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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In February, 1995, the thirty-seven-year-old British actor and comedian Stephen Fry was starring with another popular British comic, Rik Mayall, in the West End production of Simon Gray's "Cell Mates." Fry had the role of George Blake, a spy and traitor who is sprung from Wormwood Scrubs, where he is serving a forty-two-year sentence, by a prison friend, Sean Bourke, and who then, through a series of stratagems, keeps Bourke living with him in Moscow for two years. Fry, a multifaceted performer (he was Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film "Wilde," and a featured player on Rowan Atkinson's TV comedy "Blackadder"), had "the manners of a convivial prelate," as Gray subsequently wrote in "Fat Chance," his account of the production. On the Sunday after the show's opening, when the weekend reviews hit the stands, however, Fry woke up feeling a "sort of clammy horror." He told me, "I had something to do, something annoying--I had agreed I would do narration for 'Peter and the Wolf' in a church somewhere. I woke up. I looked at the ceiling. I thought, I can't let this person down on 'Peter and the Wolf.' But I can't go back to the theatre. I cannot." He added, "It was just a feeling of impossibility. It's inexplicable. I'd never, ever, had stagefright and I'd done things like appear in front of close to eighty thousand people at Wembley for Nelson Mandela's birthday."
Fry fulfilled his "Peter and the Wolf" obligation at midday, returned to his apartment, wrote a series of letters to his cohorts, and then went into the garage to kill himself. "My finger was on the ignition key," he said. "But then pictures of your mother appear in front of your eyes. You cannot do that to your parents. At least I couldn't. I had tried when I was seventeen." Instead, Fry fled. "I drove to Bruges and struck east through to Germany. I had it in my head that the tip of Jutland would somehow suit me. I would buy a small wooden, quite well-heated hut. I just somehow imagined that British people didn't go there. I would learn Danish. I kind of liked the idea of going around in a big white pullover and a pipe and teaching English in some school in Denmark, meanwhile writing peculiar novels." He added, "I thought I had burned every bridge." Fry's disappearance was a subject of scandal and concern in England, where it dominated the headlines. A substitute was found for "Cell Mates," but the production never recovered, and it closed prematurely three weeks later, with a loss of some three hundred thousand pounds. "I really believed I would never come back to England," Fry said in his documentary "The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive." "I couldn't meet the gaze of anyone I knew."
In a sense, the term "stagefright" is a misnomer--fright being a shock for which one is unprepared. For professional performers, the unmooring terror hits as they prepare to do the very thing they're trained to do. According to one British medical study, actors' stress levels on opening night are equivalent "to that of a car-accident victim." When Sir Laurence Olivier was in his sixties, he considered retiring from the stage because of stagefright. It "is always waiting outside the door," he wrote in "Confessions of an Actor." "You either battle or walk away." The Canadian piano virtuoso Glenn Gould, who suffered from disabling stagefright, did walk away, abandoning the public platform for the privacy of the recording studio. "To me the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is one to zero," he said.
Stagefright is a traumatic, insidious attack on the performer's expressive instrument: the body. According to the psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan, who studied this morbid form of anxiety, the trajectory of stagefright begins with manic agitation and moodiness, proceeds to delusional thinking and obsessional fantasies, and then to "blocking"--the "complete loss of perception and rehearsed function." The actor stiffens, trembles, and grows numb and...
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