{‘I uttered complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish 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 forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien 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 preferable than factory work. 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 told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
