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How Do You Get Through a Stressful Presentation?: Practice, Practice, Practice, with John Cleese, Actor, Screenwriter and Producer
The whole business of anxiety is absolutely central to acting. And a few years ago I was asked by UCSB in Santa Barbara if I’d come in and do some acting lessons. And I was with a lovely young group of people, about 20/21 of them and I saw six of them backstage two nights ago so I’m still sort of in contact with them. And they loved it because the first thing I started to talk about was anxiety. Because when you’re going onstage the first thing you have to deal with is nerves.
Now I don’t know anyone who’s not slightly scared in front of an audience. There’s an evolutionary reason I’ve been told, which is that if you were living in a small group of people and suddenly everyone started looking at you, there would only be two reasons: one is that you were very important and the second is you’d done something that people disapproved of, that’s why staring is rude and makes you feel uncomfortable.
As to the question of what can you do about nerves, it will get better, but remember that even the greatest actors usually have some nerves. I mean apparently sir John Gielgud, who was one of the greatest actors of my youth, you couldn’t stand near him because his stomach was so churned up with anxiety that has breath became positively foul. So don’t think it will ever completely go away. But the way you deal with it, first of all in my opinion, and this is just my opinion, is to be almost over rehearsed. Because when the fear comes you’ll tighten up as sure as X is X. But if you have practiced your performance and rehearsed it again and again and again, and I always point out to my students that the French word for rehearsal is a repetition.
So again and again and again. It’s like a golfer trying to get his swing right. When you get in the zone, when you start hitting that ball every time it’s because you’ve practiced so many times and your conscious mind it doesn’t have to control things because it’s kind of almost a muscle memory. And when you’re doing lines and movements that becomes a muscle memory just as much as an intellectual memory. So I would say repeat it again and again and again and again because then when you go out onstage and the fear hits you you can just do it anyway because you can do it on automatic for the first few performances. So that’s one very important thing.
The other is I do think that you can learn a relaxation technique. And a lot of people will do meditation. I do a thing called the Alexander Technique invented by an Australian opera singer called C.H. – no. No. Not C.H., he was a chest of player, a guy called Alexander. And I lie on my back; I put my knees up so that it’s like that and I put a book under my head and I imagine a little invisible thread just stretching me. And if I lie like that for 20 minutes I can feel the tensions in my body begin to fade away. And it seems to me that I’m best if I go onstage after something like 40 minutes of that. And I literally just lie there for 40 minutes and relax. Because then when you’re more relaxed, first of all, your muscles are less tight so the fear is not so great. But also that relaxation get you a little bit more able to be in the moment. Because this left brain or left brain of ours can be a bit of a handicap at things like this if that’s the only thing we use to counter fear. The right brain stuff, meditation and relaxation and just simple heart repetition I think is the answer at the beginning, but then it gets better.