{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading 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 nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, uttering utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out 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 listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
