{‘I spoke utter twaddle for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the void 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 addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character through?’” 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
