{‘I spoke 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 struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. 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 small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
