{‘I spoke utter twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical lock-up, not to mention a total verbal block – all right under the lights. So how and why does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her exempt in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to 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 quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, speaking utter twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the rehearsal process but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to cloud over. My knees would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the best part 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 stamina for plays but relishes his performances, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, completely lose yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure relief – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to beat the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my voice – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
