{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden 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 haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
