{‘I delivered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited 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 shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out 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 ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss 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 talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let 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 delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
