{‘I uttered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering 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, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. 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 typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing 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 continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
