Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering 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 Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview 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 honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised 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, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination 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 doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard 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 torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than manual labor. 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 told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
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