{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the garden 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 promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “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 first preview 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 worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying 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 happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
