06 Dec 2025
{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production 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 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 – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director 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 spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time 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 listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
