{‘I spoke complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout 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 prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, 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 get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “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, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases 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 stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very 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 interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
