{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, 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 dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms 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 drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
