{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked 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 talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control 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 maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “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 first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial 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 “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
