{‘I delivered utter nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, as well as a complete verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely engage in the role. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your chest. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked