{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow 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 intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects 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 felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
