{‘I spoke total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ 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 find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept 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 words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left 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 easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
