{‘I delivered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out 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 cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “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. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited 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 remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
