{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better 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 notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
