{‘I spoke total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
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 equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape 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 made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” 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 facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up 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 beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
