{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” 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 open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” 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 speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
