{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
