‘I talked complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and more on the horror of stage fright | stage

DEric Jacobi had a bout of it during the Hamlet world tour. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to the opening of The Vertical Hour on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson likened it to a “disease.” It even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage while teaching Rita. “I was completely gone,” he said, though he returned to finish the show.

Stage fright can cause shakiness, but it can also lead to a complete physical freeze, not to mention complete verbal dehydration – all under the lights. So how and why do they get caught? Can it be overcome? How do you feel when an actor’s nightmare takes hold of you?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself wearing an outfit I don’t recognize, in a role I can’t remember, looking out into the audience naked.” Decades of experience didn’t give her immunity in 2010, while previewing Shirley Valentine’s Willie Russell. “Are you doing a one-woman show for two and a half hours?” She says. “This is the thing that will give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking about doing Stephen Fry just before the press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I run away now, they won’t find me.'”

Sial found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but she continued to fight through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and thought: I will get out of it. And I did. Shirley Valentine’s character could have been improvised because the whole thing was speaking to the audience. So I made my way around the group and thought a little about myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, talking complete nonsense in character.

Larry Lamb suffered from severe nerves over his decades of theater work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the training process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I stood in front of the audience, everything started to darken,” he says. “My knees started knocking uncontrollably.”

His stage fright didn’t diminish when he turned pro. “It’s been going on for about 30 years, but I’ve gotten better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he reprized the role of Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview in Stratford-upon-Avon. I was in my opening speech, when Claudius was addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It just got worse and worse and worse. The whole cast was on stage, looking at me as I completely passed out.”

This performance was overtaken, but director Stephen Pimlott realized what had happened. “He realized that I wasn’t in control, I looked like I was. You’re not interacting with the audience,” he said. “And when the lights go out, you block them out.”

Pimlott kept the house lights on so that Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we had been performing the show for the better part of a year, the stage fright gradually disappeared, until I became confident in myself and interacting directly with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live performances and performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You don’t allow for space, it’s bigger than you, and it’s not enough personality.”

Harmony Rose Bremner, who was named to The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do — which is to be free, to let go, to fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the character through?’” In the years, as one of five actors playing the same woman at different stages of her life, she has been thrilled but also intimidated. “I grew up doing theater. That was always my happy place. I never thought I would have performance anxiety.”

She remembers the first preview night. “Actually, I didn’t know if I could keep going,” she says. “This was the first time I felt this.” She managed it, but felt overwhelmed in the opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking in the dark. We weren’t looking at each other so there were only the lines I’ve heard so many times, coming towards me. I’ve had the classic symptoms I’ve had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, as if your breath is being sucked by a vacuum in your chest. There’s nothing to hold on to.” This was exacerbated by the feeling of not wanting to let down my fellow actors: “I felt a responsibility to everyone. I thought: Can I get through this huge thing?”

Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his ambitions to become a footballer, and he was working as a forklift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and joined him. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I would deliberately do it because it was pure escape – and it was better than working in a factory. I would do my best to overcome the fear.”

His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge Theatre. When the cast was told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, at the first preview for The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my own voice — with its strong black country accent — and looked at this beautiful stage, with a three-ton chandelier in my peripheral vision.” He had rarely heard that accent on stage before. “I just froze. I felt like I tricked people into being there. It felt like a million years between the first line and the second. I can’t remember — but I think Anna jumped.”

Earlier this year, Hart took part in a revival of The Seagull, alongside Cate Blanchett, and was required to improvise. “I tried to empty my head as I went on, but an empty head is a nightmare for someone with stage fright. I put myself in a state of fear every night – and it was so rewarding when things went well. But there was a night when I kept going and saw Margot Robbie sitting there, opposite Liz Truss. My mind couldn’t process her vision. Then the intrusive thoughts started.”

Hart struggled and believes perfectionism may contribute to pre-performance nerves. Currently starring in the West End hit Stereophonic, he says: “I’m afraid I won’t give an audience member what they paid an incredible amount of money to see. It’s about making sure you do well by 10. Perfectionism gets the better of me, but there’s a duty I have to take seriously.”

Can stage fright be overcome? Rose Bremner, who plays Nina in The Seagull at the Edinburgh Lyceum Theater and Chichester Festival this autumn, says what helps her is shifting her focus from within to what’s happening around her. “I remember one of my drama school teachers said: ‘Your mind can’t think about two things at once. So focus on something outside of your thoughts and feelings.” I try to breathe and listen to something besides the voice in my head. It’s about using the other actors and the story to pull you out of the fog.

She says there are things you can’t control. “Like the first night, knowing someone really important is in the audience. But now I’ve made it a rule for myself that if people are talking about how so-and-so is, I avoid that conversation.”

Hart has his own set of techniques, some derived from his years playing football while scouts watched him intently. “Oddly enough, that early training definitely helps on stage. You’re going there, but remember – you can’t plan where the ball is going to go.”

Fear, Sial suggests What could go wrong is worse than the freeze itself. “When things go wrong, you find your way back,” she says. “In the end, no one dies – and the public is very forgiving.”