{‘I spoke utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show 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 chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
