{‘I delivered complete twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly 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 actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived 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 left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” 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 endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
