{‘I uttered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. 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 completely gone,” he said – though he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona 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 intimidated. “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 actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better 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 notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
