{‘I uttered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better than factory work. 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 told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
