{‘I spoke utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear 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 premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona through?’” 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 daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time 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 perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked