{‘I spoke complete nonsense for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – though he did reappear to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t remember, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit leading to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to persist, then quickly forgot her lines – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the words came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe nerves over decades of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze 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 stuck in space. It got more severe. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured 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 audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but enjoys his performances, 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 you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space 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 thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to grasp.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for causing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best 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 recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
