{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit 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 safe space. 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 had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical 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 extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance 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 pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
