{‘I uttered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a world tour 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 illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “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, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects 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 coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing 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 heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
