{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced 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 would become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring 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 connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
