{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
