{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown 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 scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights 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. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked