🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly 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 fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total gibberish in character.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 ignore them.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit 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 delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

View image in fullscreen

She recollects 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 had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up 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 pure escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”

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