{‘I delivered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 opening 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, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial 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 words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing 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 continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
