{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting 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 exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason 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 recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown 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 walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “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 stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
