{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found 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 persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods 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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
