{‘I uttered total gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I improvised for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety 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, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, relax, totally immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls 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 coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines 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 feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His initial 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 “petrified”. 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 initial line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
