{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, 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 started to get hazy. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command 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 left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
