{‘I uttered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role to emerge?’” 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 stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview 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 accent – and {looked
