{‘I spoke complete gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
