{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry 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 induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show 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 spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed 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 opening try-out. “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 initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior 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 notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
