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

Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all precisely under the gaze. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?

Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal mustered the courage to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in character.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over years of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”

The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”

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She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing 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, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”

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