{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years 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 heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
