{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Stage Fright

Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did come back to conclude the show.

Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, as well as a complete 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 seized by the stage terror?

Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”

Syal gathered the courage to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in persona.”

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Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of theatre. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”

The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”

He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”

The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”

Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”

Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”

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She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, 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 lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”

Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”

His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked