{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. 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 rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
