{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. 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 completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona 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 lines came back. I improvised for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening 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, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to 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 existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority 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 energy for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
