{‘I delivered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting 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 easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
