{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director 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 ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
