{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void 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 talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control 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 maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at 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, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
