{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. 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 extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
