{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised 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 left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering 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, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
