{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-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 gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited 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 remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked