{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly 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 find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began 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 started to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. 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 rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
