{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “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 whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted 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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first 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 “terrified”. 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 first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
