{‘I delivered total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. 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 completely gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived 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 lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better 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 notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
