{‘I spoke complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”

‘I utterly lost it’ … Larry Lamb, left, with Samuel West in Hamlet at the RSC, 2001.

Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

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

The director kept the audience lighting 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 performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

‘Like your air is being sucked up’ … Harmony Rose-Bremner, right, with the cast of The Years.

She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked

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{‘I spoke complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright

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