{‘I spoke total gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking 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 listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “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 relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
