{‘I uttered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued 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 whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end 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 conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
