{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on 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 first preview 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 worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
