{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. 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 charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. 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 standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked