{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. 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 rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. 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 intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked