{‘I delivered complete gibberish for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a total verbal loss – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” A long time of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then immediately forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for several moments, speaking utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but acting induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would start shaking uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled 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 opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the fear disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for causing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat 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 “petrified”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
