{‘I delivered utter twaddle for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it while on a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it in the run-up to The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has likened it to “a disease”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry went missing from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be defeated? And what does it appear to be to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a part I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not render her immune in 2010, while staging a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the factor that is going to trigger stage fright. I was honestly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before press night. I could see the exit 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 stay, then immediately forgot her words – but just persevered through the confusion. “I looked into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just moved around the scene and had a little think to myself until the words returned. I improvised for three or four minutes, saying utter gibberish in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a career actor. “It persisted for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he froze as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got increasingly bad. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He survived that show but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw 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 presence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were doing the show for the best part of the year, over time the fear disappeared, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the vigor for theatre but loves his live shows, performing his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept getting in the way of his character. “You’re not permitting the space – it’s too much you, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Self-awareness and insecurity go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be free, relax, fully immerse yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the role to emerge?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt overwhelmed. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my happy place. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recalls the night of the first preview. “I really didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all standing still, just addressing into the blackness. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d heard so many times, reaching me. I had the classic signs that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, like your breath is being drawn out with a void in your lungs. There is no support to cling to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the duty to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for inducing his stage fright. A spinal condition ruled out his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a acquaintance submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Standing up in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at drama school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was total escapism – and was preferable than factory work. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the show would be filmed for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I listened to my accent – with its distinct Black Country speech – and {looked
