{‘I spoke utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
