{‘I delivered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the unknown 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 made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
