{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, saying complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages 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 recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable 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 notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
