{‘I spoke complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave 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 honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more adept 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “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 actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 first line. “I perceived my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
