{‘I delivered complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. 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 totally gone,” he stated – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for several moments, saying utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at masking 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as 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 recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
