Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared 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 speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for several moments, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut 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. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit 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 thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
A tech enthusiast and writer passionate about emerging technologies and their impact on society, with a background in software development.
News
