{‘I uttered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through 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 interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to permit the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually 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 very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses 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 emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” 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 enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. 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 informed the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out 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