{‘I spoke complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled 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 take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing 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 survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed 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 initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked