{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised 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 lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. 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, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
