{‘I delivered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming 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 existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs 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 extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
