{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for several moments, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed 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 really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing 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, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “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 continued because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
