{‘I spoke utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona 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 daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
