{‘I uttered total nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised 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 ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” 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 intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. 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 informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
