{‘I spoke total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”

Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown 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 scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for several moments, speaking utter nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”

He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”

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. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing 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 stuck at it because it was sheer distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”

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