{‘I delivered complete twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening 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 completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept 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 improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
