{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “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. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
