{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination 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 best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “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. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
