View from the Green Room: Let’s talk about stagefright
Peter Hanley in his play 'What are you afraid of?' which was performed at Theatre Royal by Rough Magic in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Peter Hanly’s play about stagefright is a quirky weird bio-script that never loses its audience. How could it when the audience is part of the action?
It’s a play about a play. And a play within a play. And a play that plays with time as a sequence. And a play that finds the joy of rehearsal in the fun of the practice room.
Sound and lighting are active participants. A solo spot deliberately excludes the main character of the story. A sequence of back stage audio-prompts strikes terror into the actor who is in the glaring headlights of an audience that has paid for a performance. We’ve all experienced the terror of the phrase ‘Beginners to the stage please’.
The script acts out the struggle of the main character Peter as he tries to understand the origin and meaning of what stagefright actually is. Confronting it might just bring redemption.
Peter Hanly was a much sought after actor who had never blanked even once in a very successful acting career until, one night in rehearsal for the Gate’s production of Molly Sweeney in 2011, he feared he just might forget his lines. The terror of that inexplicable experience drilled into the acting experience so deeply that he constantly sought assurance from his conscious self that the succeeding lines would come. In other words, he excluded himself from the live moment acting experience into a simultaneous subsequent sequence in order to assure himself that the lines would come. Truth postponed, alas, in a well-rehearsed performance. Nevertheless, the fear remained and tonight’s play attempts to explain the nightmare that imagination conjures up:
(Gerard Manly Hopkins)
The terror becomes so intense that he walks away from theatre and film work, leaving himself without an identity… "What are you when you’re no longer an actor?"...or an income! Just how he survived is never answered.
And yet, here we are. A player who can’t act in a play he penned about an actor who can no longer act. Onstage, he is bullied by a terrifying voice-over stage manager who hounds him onto the acting space where he feels naked in public. Just what drives him on? Past stage experience of encountering the sublime?
Lynne Parker directs with pace and punches through the lengthy wordiness of the script with great care. Domhnall Herdman is superb as the grandfather who died before Peter was born and who attempts to console and give advice. None of it works but it does allow for some witty conversation around the whatiffery of events suppressed in time that may prevent the future coming to pass. Niamh McAllister appears in a succession of ‘cash or card’ smarty-pants therapists who see Peter as an irritation.
The problem with the script is that, while it attempts to drill down into Peter’s paranoia to find its causes, it never quite reaches a conclusion. Perhaps, because there really aren’t any? Every actor experiences stagefright; dealing with it is the issue.
The journey of the fragile hero who becomes ever more fragile is very clever in an actorly way and the actors in the audience love it. However, the script is repetitive, overly-clever and has numerous side stories – his parents’ dementia, the audience’s fears, meaning of time and identity, his grandfather’s history amid others – but, while the experience of stagefright is imaginatively described, the issue of what caused Peter’s stagefright is never reached.
Peter Hanly’s story is compelling, acting is wonderful and audience sympathy is on his side as the curtain falls.
Intriguing and well worth the ticket.
