{‘I spoke total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into 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 addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
