{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
