{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally 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 interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
