{‘I spoke complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal block – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over years of performances. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview 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 more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
