{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though 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 precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking total gibberish in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”

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

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “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 opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

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