{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour 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 prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – 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 ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued 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 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 stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
