{‘I uttered utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking 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 seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to permit the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases 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 performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to grasp.” 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 survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – 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 “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked