{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ 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 gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages 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 stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
