{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing 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. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, saying complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed 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 truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing 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 classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
