{‘I uttered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial 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 respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was superior than manual labor. 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 told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
