{‘I uttered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if 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 presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own verse. 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 selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was preferable 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 notified the show would be captured 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 delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked