{‘I uttered complete twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also cause a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal loss – all precisely under the spotlight. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for several moments, uttering complete gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful nerves over years of theatre. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would start knocking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, let go, fully engage in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to acting school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His first 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”. Years later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I heard my voice – with its strong Black Country speech – and {looked
