{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
