{‘I uttered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over a long career of stage work. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for plays but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, totally engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly 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 superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
