{‘I spoke utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually 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 opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best 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 production would be filmed 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 delivered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
