The stress suffered by actors going onstage for a first night is reckoned to be the equivalent of suffering a minor car crash.
Their chief terror is the possibility of forgetting their lines, or — worse — not knowing any of them in the first place.
Only those with freakish self-confidence can sail through. Aged 17, Boris Johnson played the lead role in a school production of Shakespeare’s Richard II.
It is a particularly demanding role, requiring the actor to be on stage for most of the play’s two and a half hours.
The stress suffered by actors going onstage for a first night is reckoned to be the equivalent of suffering a minor car crash. Only those with freakish self-confidence can sail through. Aged 17, Boris Johnson played the lead role in a school production of Shakespeare’s Richard II
He also has 758 lines to remember, in the right order, if possible.
Then, as now, Boris wasn’t a great one for preparation.
‘It was fairly obvious that he had not learnt the part,’ recalled his proud father, Stanley Johnson, some years later, ‘but he winged it splendidly, inventing on the hoof a sequence of nearly perfect Shakespearian pentameters’.
Others in the audience remember it a little differently.
They recall Boris pasting his lines on bits of paper around the set, and running about madly from one side of the stage to another, trying to read them.
If ever he was unable to find the line he wanted, he would simply cover it up with a joke. The headmaster was said to have been furious, but Boris remained unflustered.
For most of us, forgetting our lines is the stuff of nightmares.
As a schoolboy, I was given the tedious job of prompter in a production of the wordy restoration comedy She Stoops To Conquer.
I remember spending most of the evening at the side of the stage delivering the next line, while the terrified actors stood stock still and craned their necks as they struggled to hear what I was saying.
When, in later years, it was my turn to act, I put all my acting energy into remembering the next line with nothing left for facial expressions, tones of voice, dramatic pauses and so on.
This is why I have every sympathy for those brave souls who volunteer to perform in Amateur Dramatics.
They have every reason to be terrified: they have had no formal training and are not even paid for their nightly trauma.
‘It was fairly obvious that he had not learnt the part,’ recalled his proud father, Stanley Johnson, some years later, ‘but he winged it splendidly, inventing on the hoof a sequence of nearly perfect Shakespearian pentameters’
Also, they know that they will pass half the audience in the street the next day. If anything goes wrong, they have no place to hide.
So I feel particularly sorry for Dr Christopher Price, a retired GP, who was acting in Alan Ayckbourn’s play Season’s Greetings at an amateur production staged at Saxlingham Nethergate village hall in Norfolk last Christmas.
At one point during his performance, a 66-year-old member of the audience, Mr Howard Osborne, started heckling, along with two of his sons.
Afterwards Dr Price, understandably upset, told Mr Osborne that he would be unwelcome at the after-show party.
Things then got out of hand. Furious at being refused admission to the party, Mr Osborne approached Dr Price in his dressing room, saying, ‘You’ve got five seconds to apologise to me or I’ll punch you through that wall’.
It was all a far cry from ‘Darling, you were marvellous!’ Mr Osborne then threw five or six punches at Dr Price. According to one witness ‘there was blood everywhere’.
The police were called and this week Mr Osborne was fined £750 and ordered to pay £750 damages for causing actual bodily harm.
Some time ago, at the Poetry Festival in my own Suffolk town, a drunken poet in the audience began heckling a comparatively sober poet onstage, and afterwards the two fell into fisticuffs in the street.
But poets are famously disgruntled and Poetry Festivals are famously incendiary, so the police decided not to get involved.
Thankfully, heckling in the theatre is comparatively rare.
Members of the audience may not like your acting, but they are polite and keep their misgivings to themselves.
Unless, of course, they are critics, in which case they are paid to make them public.
Sadly, however, the truth sometimes emerges by mistake.
One famous actor finished a first night in a West End play feeling that it had all gone swimmingly.
But then, sitting in his dressing room, he overheard comments over the Tannoy from members of the audience as they filed out of the auditorium.
‘Well,’ said one woman to her husband, ‘after that performance, all we need now is for the dog to have been sick in the car.’