{‘I delivered utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening 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 find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked