{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character 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 moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
