{‘I delivered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make 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 factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects 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 coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
