{‘I spoke complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering 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 said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering total gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with 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 existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, release, completely lose yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard 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 air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is nothing to grasp.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all 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 captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked
