{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 addressing 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 director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
