{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “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 entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored 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 shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing 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 persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked