{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out 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 worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat 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 captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
