{‘I delivered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery 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 ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, saying complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
