{‘I spoke total twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer 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 shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school 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 conquer 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 “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
