{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – 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 character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over years of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview 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 distinct Black Country speech – and {looked