{‘I delivered utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to stay, then promptly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the fog. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of 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 moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense anxiety over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about 30 years, 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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point 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 connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t observing 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, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for causing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my voice – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
