{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “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 entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
