{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
