{‘I spoke utter gibberish for four minutes’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, speaking total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
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 had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time 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 pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked