{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void 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 lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over years of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but loves his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
