{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit 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 nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
