{‘I spoke utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over decades of performances. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance 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 spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety disappeared, until I was self-assured and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers 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 had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to 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 inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
