{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety

Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. 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 explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 stage and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, speaking total twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked