{‘I spoke utter nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even led some to run away: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can induce the tremors but it can also trigger a full physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal drying up – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t know, in a part I can’t recall, looking at audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not render her protected in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before press night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal found the nerve to stay, then immediately forgot her lines – but just continued through the confusion. “I looked into the abyss 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 addressing the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for several moments, saying utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but performing induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a pro. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at hiding 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 initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The full cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in control but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the fear vanished, until I was confident and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for plays but loves his live shows, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not permitting the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, totally engage in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing 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, approaching me. I had the standard indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being sucked up with a vacuum in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to insecurity for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at training I would be the final one every time we did something. I continued because it was total relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “terrified”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
