{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. 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, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
