{‘I spoke utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance 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 the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, 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 start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “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, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
