{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial 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”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
