{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at 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, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
