{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. 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 mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, 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 directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods 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 remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play 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 cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
