{‘I spoke total 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 world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through 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 engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted 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 recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out 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, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked