{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason 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 describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing 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 ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first 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 “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked