{‘I spoke complete nonsense for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing 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 indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
