{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show 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 improvised for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, 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 early performance 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, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” 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 happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing 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, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
