{‘I uttered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
