{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of performances. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, 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 lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
