{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape 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 moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge 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 best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, delivering 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 you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “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 opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
