{‘I spoke total gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi endured a bout of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to run away: Stephen Fry vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – even if he did come back to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the tremors but it can also provoke a complete physical freeze-up, not to mention a complete verbal drying up – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be taken over by the stage terror?
Meera Syal explains a typical anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t identify, in a character I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to give you stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the exit going to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then immediately forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the haze. “I stared into the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her addressing the audience. So I just moved around the stage and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, speaking complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over years of performances. When he began as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would begin trembling wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more skilled at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my lines got lost in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that performance but the leader recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in control but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director maintained the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but loves his performances, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the space – it’s too much yourself, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was selected in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, fully lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to let the persona to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was delighted yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised 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 opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the very opening scene. “We were all stationary, just addressing into the dark. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d heard so many times, coming towards me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this degree. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being extracted with a vacuum in your chest. There is no anchor to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let fellow actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes self-doubt for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Performing in front of people was utterly alien to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior than factory work. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the production would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
