{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
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. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
