{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at 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 interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
