{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing 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, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming 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 acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations 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 totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut 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 initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked