{‘I delivered complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – though he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over decades of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but performing filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood 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 block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest 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 production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
