{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door 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 courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for several moments, saying utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the director 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 spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
