{‘I spoke total nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then quickly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a moment to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking utter gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to get hazy. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It persisted 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and openly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my head to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed 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 actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking 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 miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for triggering his nerves. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion applied to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer 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 captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
