{‘I uttered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – though he did return to conclude the show.

Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal drying up – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying complete gibberish in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, totally engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine 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 drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome 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 “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked