{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona 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 daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects 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 first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified 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 cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
