{‘I uttered utter 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 throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at 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 connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators 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 extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar 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 escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked