{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? 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 know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control 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 left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
