{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing 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 insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity 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 enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial 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 “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
