{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door 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 nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
