{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited 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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A lower 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 was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
