{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked