{‘I uttered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. 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 remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with 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 presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, 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 bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms 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 sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
