{‘I delivered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview 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 truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total 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 told the production 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 uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
