{‘I uttered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial 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, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting 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 staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving 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 self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was better 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 notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
