{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. 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 totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected 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, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. 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 informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
