{‘I delivered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue 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 got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the role through?’” 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. 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, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than manual labor. 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
