{‘I spoke complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved 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 knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, fully immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome 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 “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
