{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting 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 character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted 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 opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – 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 told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
