{‘I spoke total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview 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 worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming 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 acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” 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 standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
