{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”

The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 opening 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 endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own writing. 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 cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”

His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked