{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a international run 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 illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial 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, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. 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 notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
