{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise 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 majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
