{‘I uttered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up 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 returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 spoke his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
