{‘I delivered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
