{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, 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. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden 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 promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 lines got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, completely lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the role in?’” 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
