{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, presenting 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 persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college 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 sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
