{‘I delivered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing 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 nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 lines 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 degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
