{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. 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, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow 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 causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
