{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
