{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance 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 pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
