{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode 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 malady”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for a short while, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance 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 spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing 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 rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first 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 “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
