{‘I delivered total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for a short while, saying total twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some 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 tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
