Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
