{‘I delivered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “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-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects 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 succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
