{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “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 entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, 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 engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
