{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director 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 ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 first line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
