{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show 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 opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial 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 bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
