{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting 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 Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
