{‘I spoke complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, as well as a total verbal loss – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
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.” A long time of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for several moments, uttering complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over a long career of theatre. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting 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 staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at 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, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview 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 pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
