{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for a short while, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed 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 breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing 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 friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
