{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing 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 open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if 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 house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “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, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified 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 selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
