{‘I uttered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed 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 script returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish 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 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 dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls 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 experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing 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 rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing 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 submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked