{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
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 free, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. 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 support to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial 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”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
