{‘I spoke total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice 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 start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at 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 interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the part. The question 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 excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
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 managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at 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 standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
