{‘I spoke complete twaddle for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it while on a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all precisely under the gaze. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the open door going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the lines reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, saying utter twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over decades of theatre. When he started out as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got better and better at masking 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 initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be free, release, completely immerse yourself in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited 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 recollects the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his performance anxiety. A spinal condition ruled out his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was total distraction – and was better than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to overcome 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. 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 initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked