{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “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 whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in role.”

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

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept 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 majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance 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 dialect – and {looked