{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
