{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show 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 opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled 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 recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “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 persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
