{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
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 had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long 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 initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
