{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into 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 scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out 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
