{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly 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 found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
