{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled 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: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. 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 cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up 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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
