{‘I uttered utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to 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 breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” 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 happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. 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 anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked