{‘I uttered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, speaking utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit 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 delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
