{‘I delivered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing 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 opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, uttering total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on 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 first preview 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 worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than factory work. 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
