{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured 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 spoke his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
