{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on 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 improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show 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 connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
