{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. 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 told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time 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 perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
