{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced 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 moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide 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 illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing 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 standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
