{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout 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 malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up 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 lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
