{‘I delivered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character to emerge?’” 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” 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 endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
