{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on 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 led some to flee: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, viewing 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 monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, saying total nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command 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 general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to let the persona through?’” 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 grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to give my all 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 play would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. 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 heard my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
