{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
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 naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
