{‘I uttered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked