{‘I delivered complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights 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 turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at 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, coming towards 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 breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. 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 told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
