{‘I delivered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a episode of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also trigger a total physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with severe fear over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 words got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but enjoys his performances, 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 character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, relax, totally immerse yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to let the character in?’” 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 been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ended his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure distraction – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
