{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting 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 ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing 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 a short while, speaking total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words 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 survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
