{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed 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 lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. 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 enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
