{‘I spoke total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with 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 turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let 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 excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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 standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first 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 initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
