{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting 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 press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, 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 listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was superior than factory work. 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
