{‘I delivered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole 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 control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – 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 contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, 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 utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
