{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time 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 heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
