{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I winged it for several moments, speaking total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering 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 you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up 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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer 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 “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
