{‘I spoke complete gibberish for a brief period’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and Others on the Fear of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a bout of it throughout a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy struggled with it before The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even led some to take flight: One comedian disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry walked off the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he said – although he did return to finish the show.
Stage fright can trigger the jitters but it can also cause a full physical freeze-up, to say nothing of a complete verbal block – all directly under the gaze. So how and why does it take grip? Can it be overcome? And what does it feel like to be seized by the stage terror?
Meera Syal recounts a common anxiety dream: “I discover myself in a attire I don’t know, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not make her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Performing a solo performance for an extended time?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the way out leading to the yard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to find me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her dialogue – but just continued through the haze. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be made up because the whole thing was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the set and had a moment to myself until the script returned. I ad-libbed for a short while, saying utter twaddle in role.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful fear over a long career of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he adored the preparation but acting filled him with fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all began to become unclear. My legs would start knocking wildly.”
The stage fright didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It went on for about 30 years, 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 addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got trapped in space. It got more severe. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that act but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only looking as if I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the illumination come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director left the house lights on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got easier. Because we were staging the show for the best part of the year, gradually the anxiety went away, until I was self-assured and directly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for theatre but loves his live shows, presenting his own writing. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not permitting the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Insecurity and self-doubt go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely engage in the role. The challenge is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role through?’” 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 developed doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I truly didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt overwhelmed in the very first opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the dark. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to bounce off. There were just the words that I’d rehearsed so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The sensation of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being sucked up with a vacuum in your lungs. There is no anchor to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to the entire cast. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames self-doubt for triggering his nerves. A back condition ended his hopes to be a footballer, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a friend submitted to theatre college on his behalf and he was accepted. “Performing in front of people was totally foreign to me, so at drama school I would be the final one every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was pure escapism – and was preferable than manual labor. I was going to do my best to overcome the fear.”
His initial 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 cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his first line. “I heard my accent – with its pronounced Black Country speech – and {looked
