{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense 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 being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised 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 shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed 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 respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
