{‘I delivered complete gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for a short while, saying utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over years of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the rehearsal process but performing induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It continued for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but relishes his performances, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. 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 continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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 “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 first line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
