{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through 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 connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases 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 nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
