{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control 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 maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages 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 remembers 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 experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years 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 pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
