{‘I delivered total nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
