{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview 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 increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than factory work. 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 show would be recorded 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 delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
