{‘I spoke total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting 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 doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes 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 giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
