{‘I spoke utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he said – even if he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a full physical lock-up, as well as a utter verbal drying up – all right under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it appear to be to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” A long time of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her words – but just persevered through the haze. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome 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 moved around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I winged it for a short while, saying complete nonsense in role.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but performing caused fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better 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 opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He endured that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director maintained the house lights on so Lamb would have to recognise 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, gradually the anxiety disappeared, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his live shows, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the character in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She remembers the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to breathe properly, like your air is being drawn out with a void in your chest. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to self-doubt for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition ruled out his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “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 total distraction – and was better than industrial jobs. 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 show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked