{‘I spoke complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening 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 walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can cause the shakes but it can also provoke a total physical freeze-up, not to mention a utter verbal loss – all right 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 performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m unclothed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a early show of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a monologue 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 way out opening onto the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the fog. “I looked into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her addressing the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a brief reflection to myself until the script reappeared. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying complete twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced severe anxiety over years of stage work. When he started out as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but being on stage induced fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all would become unclear. My knees would start trembling uncontrollably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t lessen when he became a career actor. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my lines got stuck in space. It got increasingly bad. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I utterly lost it.”
He endured that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in control but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the illumination come down, you then block them out.’”
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. “Little by little, it got easier. Because we were performing the show for the majority of the year, gradually the anxiety vanished, until I was confident and actively engaging with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for theatre but relishes his gigs, performing his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be uninhibited, let go, fully immerse yourself in the part. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my mind to let the role to emerge?’” 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 overwhelmed. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recalls the night of the opening try-out. “I actually didn’t know if I could go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all standing still, just talking into the blackness. 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, coming towards me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The sensation of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a vacuum in your torso. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the emotion of not wanting to disappoint cast actors down: “I felt the duty to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I endure this enormous thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his performance anxiety. A lower back condition ruled out his hopes to be a soccer player, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Performing 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 sheer distraction – and was superior than manual labor. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His first acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “petrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his opening line. “I listened to my voice – with its pronounced Black Country dialect – and {looked