Enter Stage Right

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

Laura Condlln is a 27-year-old actor who just completed a 20-week intensive course at the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training at the Stratford Festival. Founded in 1998 by festival artistic director Richard Monette, the conservatory’s aim is to train the next generation of actors. Young thespians apprentice at the conservatory, and as part of their training, are cast in a season of Stratford. In this, her fourth season, Condlln appears in three plays: she plays a Goddess in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Audrey in the Bard’s As You Like It and a role in Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark. What follows are Condlln’s impressions of her opening week on the Stratford stage.

Day 3

I think the hardest part of opening week is the feeling of being under the microscope. Let’s be honest: there are critics everywhere — even inside our own heads — but sometimes it’s hard to have a thick skin that protects you from the harsh judgments of others.

It is my belief that as actors, the learning and growth process never stops. The same holds true for productions. You can’t possibly have all the answers to your character’s journey by the time the show opens. And what would be the point? If you know everything already, why continue? I think you should have strong choices in place, a shape within your scene work that won’t shift drastically, but there has got to be room for flexibility within that form. We’re human, we’re sharing ourselves within our art, and the work must be alive, have breath — it can’t just be a replica every night. Obviously, I don’t mean that actors should have the freedom to respond to their every whim. But things in the work — the relationships between characters, connections to text — are going to grow and develop over time. Especially here at the festival, where some of the shows run for five or six months.

Someone once told me that when a show opens, it’s in its infancy, and I truly believe that. Over time it matures and settles. So why do we put such emphasis on an opening-night performance, as a kind of “make it or break it” judgment time? And reviews can do damage, even if they are good reviews. I try not to read any, but the temptation is terrible.

I bring all this up because as I was getting ready for my Tempest matinee today, I couldn’t stop analyzing my performance from Monday night, our opening night. Questions, worry, doubt — all flooding through my brain. And the reality is, I only say twenty-two words. I thought I was losing my mind. Because of the pressure of the opening, I lost all confidence and trust in my work. Brooding over whether it looked OK and sounded OK, rather than just getting on with it and doing my job. All because I have endowed critics, a handful of people in a sea of audience members, with the power to decide whether I’m good or bad. If I spend my career doing this, I’ll go mad.

A lesson I learned while training in the Birmingham Classical Conservatory here in Stratford during the winter was that good work speaks for itself, and that it’s not worth seeking the approval of others. This is a giant beacon of wisdom that will take me a while to fully grasp. Armed with this, I turn to face the rest of opening week determined to focus on what’s important: the telling of the story and my place in that.