{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging 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 ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept 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 better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
