{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show 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 frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
