{‘I spoke complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then immediately 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 ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire 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 command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting 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 presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed 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 first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – 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 show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
