{‘I delivered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” 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 way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if 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 presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last 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 overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
