{‘I delivered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing 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 trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
