{‘I delivered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, performing 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 chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role to emerge?’” 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing 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 breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
