{‘I uttered complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – and was preferable than factory work. 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 notified the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
