{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void 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 walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” 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 stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
