{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first 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 “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
