{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
