{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 dialogue got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. 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 classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
