{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over a long career of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar 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 better than factory work. 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
