{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived 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 shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked