{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he commenced 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 started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching 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 extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
