{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled 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: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader 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 lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “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, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
