{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, 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 get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command 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 left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
