{‘I uttered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his live shows, delivering 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 yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. 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 informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
