{‘I uttered total nonsense 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 global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls 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 coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
