{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue 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 the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
