{‘I spoke complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to flee: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for several moments, saying complete gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My knees would start shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he froze 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, totally engage in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at 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, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail 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 inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
