{‘I uttered utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”
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 initial try-out 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 more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his performances, performing his own writing. 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 chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the role to emerge?’” 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 daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial 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 bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
