{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it while on a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – although he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 dialogue 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 got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally lose yourself in the role. The challenge 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 thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be filmed 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 uttered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
