{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit 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 daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
