Stage Fright

In many forms and many places, I’ve done my fair share of performing. And I’ve done enough now to be able to basically academically document my own form of stage fright. I know exactly how I get anxious before a show of any kind – which doesn’t stop me getting anxious, of course, but it at least means that I’m consistent enough to manage myself.

Since the long-gone days of my teenage band, I got to observe variations of stage fright. Our bassist would get nervous the day before a gig and then be completely relaxed, our guitarist would be fine up until about half an hour beforehand and suddenly get the shakes, and our drummer would be utterly chilled until halfway through the first song, when he would suddenly realise that we were in fact onstage and not just jamming in his parents’ spare room.

And then there was me. My stage fright methods carried me through all that music and through four years of plays and comedy at university, and of course only got worse as I ended up directing some of the stuff I was performing. I was around a whole new group of people who coped with nerves in different ways; we were adults now, so we could have a pint to settle ourselves if we chose, and many of us did.

Not me. Never me. I’ve never taken to the stage anything but cold sober, because I spend the day of a show – pretty much from waking up, through all the setup, the soundchecks, the rehearsals, the waiting – being absolutely insufferable with nerves. I pace, I run lines – and when I’m directing I force other people to do the same endlessly, for which I apologise to three generations of comedians – I check props, I micromanage absolutely everything I possibly can to distract myself from the crippling fear of what I’m about to do.

This was something that did reduce a bit with repeated performances, like runs at the Edinburgh Fringe, but it never went away. And thankfully when I’ve been onstage with Ready Singer One of late it’s a largely absent fear – being part of the Great Entity that is a choir of 40-80 people does wonders for one’s individual nerves. But it’s still there a bit.

And when I have to go solo – when I’m running an RPG session, which I’m doing twice this week, or when I’m doing a TBRCon panel this Tuesday with a bunch of significantly more accomplished authors and feeling very much like a small fish in a very big pond – then it all comes flooding straight back. I’ve got a lot on this week: the aforementioned two RPG sessions, the panel, and a concert on Sunday with BBC Sounds; and it is very much fair to say that I’m pretty bloody nervous.

But it’ll be fine. I know it’ll be fine. Because the other thing about my stage fright, the important thing, is that the moment I step onstage – the moment the first note is played, the moment I open my mouth to speak, the moment I actually start to perform…

Then, it all just washes away. The nerves vanish like they were never there, and I’m absolutely in my element. Because for all that it ruins my nerves on a regular basis, for all the controlled panic beforehand, and no matter what form it takes, I love performing like nothing else in the world.

See you on Tuesday. Unless you’re in my RPG group or my choir, in which case you have your own dates.