🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led 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 – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why 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 recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. 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 gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total nonsense in character.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial 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, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked