{‘I uttered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for several moments, saying total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised 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 perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
