{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
