{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. 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 performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering total twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. 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 realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” 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 enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview 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 strong Black Country speech – and {looked
