{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, 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. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
