{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out 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 stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms 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 sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. 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 spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
