{‘I uttered complete nonsense for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door going to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The character of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just made my way around the scene and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over a long career of performances. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the preparation but performing filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My legs would start shaking wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at masking it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that act but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the general illumination on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, over time the stage fright went away, until I was self-assured and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for stage work but loves his gigs, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, release, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “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 initial performance. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this degree. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance enrolled to theatre college on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was completely alien to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I continued because it was sheer escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be captured for NT Live, he was “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
