{‘I spoke total gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical lock-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a character I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the words came back. I winged it for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with intense nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was poised and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his live shows, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not giving the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, let go, completely engage in the character. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in different stages of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the emotion of not wanting to fail other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
