From the Guardian:‘When you cry, you really cry’: the emotional toll of stage acting
“If you spend your evenings going to these horrible places, it’s part of your life.” Take it from an actor who knows. Kate Fleetwood has played both Lady Macbeth and Medea. Her last stage outing, in Tracy Letts’ Bug, was as a delusional heroin addict, hiding from a violent ex-husband, traumatised by the loss of her son. She has gone to some pretty horrible places.
Actors have to – that’s the job. But that’s not to say it doesn’t take a toll. As audiences, we look on, invest and exhale a cathartic sigh as we head home to bed, safe in the knowledge that it was all just make-believe and pretence. Only, of course, it’s not. Not entirely.
To act is to be bound up in a fiction. It is to use one’s own life, one’s own emotions and experiences, to stand in for someone else. At some level, it’s real: a real act in real time with real consequences. “You don’t not feel it,” Fleetwood stresses. “You’re not just technically producing it. When you cry, you really cry – physically, emotionally, everything. It’s in you. It’s part of your life.”
While it talks about actors clearly suffering what we know as bleed, it doesn’t talk about any strategies they have for handling it. Which is odd, given that this is a 2,000 year-old profession with a modern professional culture going back a good couple of hundred years (at least).