{‘I uttered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers 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 coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
