{‘I delivered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination 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 breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. 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 chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised 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 really didn’t know if I could perform,” 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 motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
