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

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. 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 classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His initial 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked