{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished 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 shakes but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a total verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the haze. “I looked into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking total gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense anxiety over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got trapped in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his role. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing 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 typical symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his nerves. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
