{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 opening 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, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing 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 pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer 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 captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
