{‘I spoke utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. 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 excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
