{‘I uttered complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical lock-up, as well as a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I winged it for several moments, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, 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, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but enjoys his live shows, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his role. “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. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
