{‘I delivered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
