{‘I delivered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. 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 rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed 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 opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
