{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during 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 caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
