{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader 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 illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial 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 first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
