{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason 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 classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out 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 classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked