{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best 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 captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
