{‘I spoke utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going 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 immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior 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 notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked