{‘I uttered total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised 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 lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over years of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
