{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for several moments, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
