{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her words – 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 made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first 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 survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
