{‘I uttered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
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 felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
