{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “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 opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
