{‘I delivered total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” 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 opening night. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter gibberish in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over a long career of theatre. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got more adept 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was poised and openly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the standard signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was pure relief – 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 show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I perceived my accent – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
