{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking 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 listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
