{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into 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 moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out 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 increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
