{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview 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, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide 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 lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 recorded 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 heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
