{‘I uttered complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, saying total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would start trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. 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 realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A back condition ended his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
