{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear 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 opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years 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 perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
