{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: 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 grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto 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 stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing 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 insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
