{‘I spoke complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” 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 courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
