{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected 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 factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, speaking total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 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 got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role through?’” 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial 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 interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic 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 emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked