{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in 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 cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to 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 stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced 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 started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted 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 opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
