{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing 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 stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
