{‘I spoke utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader 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 block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing 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 total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
