{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? 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 recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk 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 energy for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some 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 perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
