{‘I spoke complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of stage work. When he began 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 become unclear. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. 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 listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
