{‘I delivered utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature 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 void in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
