{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown 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 made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 initial 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 totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
