{‘I spoke complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona through?’” 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 stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation 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 dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
