{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered 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 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 winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting 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 yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
