{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the director 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 left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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 typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 informed the show would be filmed 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 first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
