{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, speaking complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really 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 initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked