{‘I delivered total twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a illness”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he stated – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal loss – all directly under the spotlight. So why and how does it take hold? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her exempt in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a monologue for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the way out opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the courage to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her addressing the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, speaking complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but being on stage filled him with fear. “The moment I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin trembling unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, but I just got better and better at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, staring at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but enjoys his gigs, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “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, agrees. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re striving to do – which is to be liberated, relax, fully lose yourself in the part. The question is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel performance anxiety.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the first time I’d felt like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to breathe properly, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I survive this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a companion submitted to acting school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was utterly foreign to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer distraction – and was better than factory work. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the show would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his first line. “I perceived my tone – with its strong Black Country accent – and {looked
