{‘I uttered utter gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he stated – even if he did return to conclude the show.
Stage fright can trigger the shakes but it can also provoke a full physical freeze-up, as well as a total verbal drying up – all precisely under the lights. So for what reason does it seize control? Can it be defeated? And what does it seem like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t remember, looking at audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while performing a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before opening night. I could see the exit opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a little think to myself until the words reappeared. I improvised for a short while, uttering complete nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful anxiety over decades of performances. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the rehearsal process but being on stage filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to get hazy. My knees would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on 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 first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, slowly the stage fright vanished, until I was self-assured and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his gigs, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely immerse yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my mind to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in different stages of her life, she was excited yet felt intimidated. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d felt like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the blackness. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his performance anxiety. A back condition ruled out his aspirations to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a companion submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer escapism – and was superior than factory work. I was going to give my all to overcome the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the production would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked