{‘I delivered utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming 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 house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. 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 perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer 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 captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
