{‘I spoke total nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening 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 catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void 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 speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
