{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening 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 catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing 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 a short while, uttering total nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination 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 pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest 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 show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
