{‘I spoke utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical lock-up, not to mention a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. 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 catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense fear over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued 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 early performance 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 worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow 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 thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
