{‘I spoke complete gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian 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 complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
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 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
