{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, saying total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing 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 classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
