{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ 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 catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide 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 lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the role in?’” 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 happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
