{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding 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 Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging 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 pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
