{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades 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 a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped 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 bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked