🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show 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 exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in persona.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted 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.”

View image in fullscreen

She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”

His initial 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”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked