{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised 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 block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. 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 heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
