{‘I uttered complete twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured 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 first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
