{‘I uttered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying 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 safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
