🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in persona.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”

He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked