{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled 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 left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut 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 opening try-out 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 strong Black Country speech – and {looked
