Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
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 had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
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