{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting 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 chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
