{‘I spoke total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to finish the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal explains a classic 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.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the nerve to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter gibberish in role.”

View image in fullscreen

Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”

The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”

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

The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was self-assured and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to let the persona 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

View image in fullscreen

She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. 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 degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked