{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – although he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor 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 leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 lines got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking 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 listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total distraction – and was better 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 play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my accent – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked
