{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing 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, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 “terrified”. Some 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
