{‘I spoke complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance 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 caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press 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 locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I improvised for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide 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 kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the character 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 stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
