{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out 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 give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages 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 performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
