{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up 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 words came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing 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 total distraction – 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 “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
