{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first 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, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
