{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune 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 honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
