{‘I delivered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough 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 anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. 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 cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. 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 classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial 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”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
