{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades 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 aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape 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 scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. 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, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators 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 sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut 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 “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
