{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes 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 room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed 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 uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked