{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
