{‘I delivered total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing 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 jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the role through?’” 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
