{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 lost in space. It got more severe. 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 command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting 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 uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
