{‘I spoke complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped 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, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director 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 lights 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 turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow 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 delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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 classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 “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 strong Black Country accent – and {looked
