{‘I spoke total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time 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 perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
