{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end 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 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
