{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in role.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat 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 “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked