{‘I spoke utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing 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 press night. I could see the way out going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the void 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 addressing the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The full 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 looking as if 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 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 best part of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow 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 intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked