{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: The Actress, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out 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 bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, saying utter nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”

The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”

He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was better 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked