{‘I delivered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own writing. 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 persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. 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 heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
