{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt 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 aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ 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 gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
