{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason 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 describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. 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 found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for several moments, saying complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very 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, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
