{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting 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 opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command 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 kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
