{‘I spoke utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated 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 completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. 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 yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
