{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering 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 exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. 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 informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
