{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. 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 rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
