{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. 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 continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first 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 “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
