{‘I delivered utter nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even caused some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also trigger a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a moment to myself until the script reappeared. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe nerves over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a career actor. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then block them out.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his performances, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, totally lose yourself in the character. 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 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 stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the words that I’d listened to so many times, approaching me. I had the classic indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your lungs. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A back condition ruled out his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was total relief – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
