{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting 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 persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
