{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape 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 made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
