{‘I delivered utter twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. 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 completely gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all directly under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage 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 shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up 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 increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but enjoys his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. 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 told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
