{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into 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 talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control 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 kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise 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 best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own writing. 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 cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first 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 respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
