🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking total gibberish in role.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – 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 attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast 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 performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked