{‘I uttered utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for several moments, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs 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 void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
