{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
