{‘I uttered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense fear over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 lines got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
