{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, speaking total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods 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 nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
