{‘I delivered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal block – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the unknown 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 speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing 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 stuck in space. It got more severe. The full 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 control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, totally engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was better 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 production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
