{‘I spoke complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “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 addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, saying utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
