{‘I delivered utter gibberish for several moments’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and Others on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a episode of it throughout a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve completely gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a complete physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So for what reason does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be gripped by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal describes a classic anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t recognise, in a character I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not make her immune in 2010, while acting in a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a one-woman show for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘fleeing’ just before opening night. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to persist, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be ad-libbed because the whole thing was her talking to the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a little think to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for several moments, saying total twaddle in character.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with severe anxiety over decades of theatre. When he began as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would get hazy. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The nerves didn’t ease when he became a professional. “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 initial try-out at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my opening speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, looking at me as I utterly lost it.”
He got through that act but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights 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 breakthrough in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was confident and directly engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but relishes his gigs, presenting his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and insecurity go against everything you’re trying to do – which is to be uninhibited, relax, completely engage in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I create room in my thoughts to allow the persona through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was thrilled yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She remembers the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt overcome in the very opening scene. “We were all motionless, just speaking out into the void. We weren’t observing one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the dialogue that I’d rehearsed so many times, coming towards me. I had the typical signs 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 sucked up with a emptiness in your chest. There is no support to grasp.” It is compounded by the sensation of not wanting to fail fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I survive this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for causing his nerves. A back condition prevented his hopes to be a athlete, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he got in. “Appearing in front of people was completely foreign to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure escapism – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to overcome the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were told the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. Years later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my tone – with its strong Black Country dialect – and {looked