{‘I uttered utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes 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 exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” 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 exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director 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 block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
