{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the role 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
