{‘I uttered utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
