{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better 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 told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
