{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character in?’” 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 remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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 captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
