{‘I spoke complete 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 global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why 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 typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved 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 get hazy. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages 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 first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance 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 dialect – and {looked