{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? 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 find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome 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 interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators 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 chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked