{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized 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 recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing 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, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting 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 stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. 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 notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
