{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out 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 give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing 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 existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
