{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked