{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out 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 worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving 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 uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to permit the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped 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 heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified 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 uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
