{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing 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 the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for a short while, speaking complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command 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 left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was poised and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the role 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 comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome 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 dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked
