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

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, speaking total gibberish in character.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation 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 start knocking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that performance 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 interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited 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.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. 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 heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked