{‘I uttered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance 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 open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys 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 permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up 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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes 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 acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
