{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
