{‘I delivered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show 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 spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better 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 told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
