{‘I uttered total gibberish for several moments’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “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, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
