{‘I uttered total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the unknown 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 talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages 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 initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching 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 take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
