{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
