{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs 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 vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar 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 better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
