{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout 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 equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left 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 staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up 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 go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
