{‘I spoke total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a episode of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also trigger a complete physical lock-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all precisely under the spotlight. So how and why 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 costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, facing audiences while I’m exposed.” Decades of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a monologue for two and half hours?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the nerve to remain, then immediately forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I ad-libbed for three or four minutes, uttering complete twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced intense nerves over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but being on stage caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It persisted for about a long time, but I just got more skilled at masking 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 first speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in command but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear went away, until I was confident and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-consciousness and insecurity go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, release, fully engage in the character. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my mind to let the character to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this level. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being extracted with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to hold on to.” It is compounded by the feeling of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames imposter syndrome for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a friend applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Standing up in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at training I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than manual labor. 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 filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his first line. “I listened to my tone – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
