{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, speaking total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination 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 improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
