{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing 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 survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
