{‘I spoke total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show 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 improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination 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 easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
