{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines 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 act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind 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 delighted 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 remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes 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 enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
