{‘I delivered utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome 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 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 uttered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
