{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going 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 nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
