{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command 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 maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough 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 fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation 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 self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
