{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part 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 stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up 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 really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. 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 rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
