{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown 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 speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
