{‘I spoke total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt 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 thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void 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 speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, saying complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited 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 truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than factory work. 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 play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
