{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing 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 open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked