{‘I spoke utter gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking 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 trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
