{‘I spoke complete gibberish 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 global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did reappear to complete the show.

Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the stage terror?

Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering total nonsense in role.”

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Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin shaking wildly.”

The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”

He endured that show but the guide 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 lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director maintained the audience lighting 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 bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was self-assured 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 permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, fully immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “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 recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is intensified by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”

His debut 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”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked