{‘I uttered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 trapped 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 show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the role 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 happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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 standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to beat 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 captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time 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 perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked