{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared 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 speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted 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 opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at 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 typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
