{‘I spoke utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue 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 extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked