{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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 indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
