{‘I spoke utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
