{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out 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 truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first 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 opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
