{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled 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 run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show 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 the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character 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 daunted. “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 first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial 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 “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
