{‘I delivered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled 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 vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing 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 open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked