{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. 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, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
