{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “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 pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
