{‘I uttered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. 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 degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable 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 show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked