{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out 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 pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
