{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona through?’” 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. 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 told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
