{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
