{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered 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 talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
