{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even prompted some to run away: One comedian went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the lights. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a typical anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a outfit I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press 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 find me.’”
Syal found the bravery to stay, then quickly forgot her lines – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up 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 script returned. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, speaking total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over a long career of performances. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but performing caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The nerves didn’t diminish when he became a pro. “It went on for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s attendance. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the anxiety went away, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his performances, delivering his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the first preview. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is intensified by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for triggering his nerves. A back condition prevented his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked