{‘I spoke utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role 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 moment to myself until the lines returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, uttering utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, totally immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking 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 heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your torso. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked