{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto 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 persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally engage 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 acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
