{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial 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 initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
