{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for several moments, speaking total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”

The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

His first 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”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked