{‘I uttered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let 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 daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
