{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
