{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” 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 way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. 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 listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
