{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. 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 informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
