{‘I delivered complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost 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 saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
