{‘I uttered total nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a global production of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour premiering on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a illness”. It has even led some to flee: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he remarked – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can induce the shakes but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, not to mention a complete verbal loss – 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 gripped by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t identify, in a role I can’t recollect, facing audiences while I’m unclothed.” A long time of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘running away’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door opening onto the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I escaped now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the bravery to remain, then quickly forgot her lines – but just soldiered on through the fog. “I stared into the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The persona of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the scene and had a moment to myself until the words reappeared. I winged it for three or four minutes, uttering complete gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with intense fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an amateur actor, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the practice but acting filled him with fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It continued for about a long time, 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 early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my words got lost in space. It got more severe. The whole cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He endured that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the lights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to acknowledge the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the majority of the year, over time the stage fright disappeared, until I was poised and directly connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for plays but relishes his gigs, delivering his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his character. “You’re not allowing the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, concurs. “Insecurity and uncertainty go against everything you’re attempting to do – which is to be liberated, let go, totally lose yourself in the role. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to permit the persona in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in different stages of her life, she was thrilled yet felt intimidated. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my happy place. 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 go on,” she says. “It was the initial instance I’d had like that.” She managed, but felt overwhelmed in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just addressing into the void. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in small doses before – but never to this extent. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being sucked up with a emptiness in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to fail cast actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for inducing his stage fright. A lower back condition ended his dreams to be a athlete, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would wait until the end every time we did something. I persevered because it was pure distraction – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to try my hardest to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the show would be captured for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the initial performance of The Constituent, in which he was selected alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he delivered his initial line. “I perceived my tone – with its distinct Black Country accent – and {looked
