{‘I uttered total twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, uttering total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed 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 uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
