🔗 Share this article

Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in character.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived 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 interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

View image in fullscreen

She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked