{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director 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 ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on 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 survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
