{‘I spoke total nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So why and how 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 recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge 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 kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
