{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. 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 self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited 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 recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing 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 heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked