{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play 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 first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
