{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to 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, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start knocking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader 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 spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best 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 production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
