{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading 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 bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
