{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into 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 addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise 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 best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “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 sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
