{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” 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 been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing 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 typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
