{‘I spoke utter twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard 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 drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
