{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
