{‘I uttered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely 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 freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. 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, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
