{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
