{‘I spoke complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why 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 describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “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 initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very 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 words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
