🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

View image in fullscreen

She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked