{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. 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 stated – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own verse. 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 character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking 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 listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first 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”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
