{‘I spoke total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long 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 heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
