{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking total twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant 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 professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that performance but the guide 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 illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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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 experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years 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 distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked