{‘I delivered total twaddle 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 world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. 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 vanished, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
