{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly 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 character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
