{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “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, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted 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 fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production 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 opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
