{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
