{‘I uttered total twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. 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 intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing 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 persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
