{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with 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 presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” 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 daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years 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 distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
