{‘I uttered utter 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 preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide 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 shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. 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 notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
