{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ 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 remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
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. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
