{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why 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 typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
