🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press 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 catch me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total gibberish in role.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking 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 lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “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 persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

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