{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout 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 malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
