{‘I uttered complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Decades of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just persevered through the haze. “I faced 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 speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for several moments, saying total nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe fear over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was confident and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, presenting 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 character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be free, let go, completely immerse yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up 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 initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the void. We weren’t facing 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 classic signs that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is intensified by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his performance anxiety. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion enrolled to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
