{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance 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 increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming 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 house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves 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 you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking 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 rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
