{‘I delivered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry 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 cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape 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 walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he froze 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 speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – 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 told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
