{‘I uttered total nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical paralysis, as well as a utter verbal loss – all right under the spotlight. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines came back. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 words got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow 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 excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I actually didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
