{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at 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, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
