{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
