{‘I uttered total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical freeze-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I winged it for a short while, saying utter nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over decades of performances. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but acting caused fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My legs would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines 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 got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the fear went away, until I was self-assured and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving 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 insecurity go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. 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 first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer distraction – and was better than factory work. 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 notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked