{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
