{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. 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 classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show 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 uttered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
