{‘I spoke complete twaddle for four minutes’: Meera Syal, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Nerves
Derek Jacobi faced 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 illness”. It has even prompted some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Lenny Henry left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did reappear to conclude the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also cause a total physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the lights. So why and how does it take grip? Can it be conquered? And what does it appear to be to be taken over by the performer’s fear?
Meera Syal explains a classic anxiety dream: “I end up in a outfit I don’t recognise, in a role I can’t recall, viewing audiences while I’m exposed.” Years of experience did not leave her exempt in 2010, while acting in a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a one-woman show for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to trigger stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to catch me.’”
Syal mustered the nerve to remain, then quickly forgot her dialogue – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I faced the unknown and I thought, ‘I’ll overcome it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the show was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the stage and had a brief reflection to myself until the lines came back. I improvised for a short while, saying utter nonsense in character.”
Larry Lamb has contended with powerful nerves over decades of stage work. When he started out as an beginner, 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 cloud over. My legs would start knocking unmanageably.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a pro. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got better and better at hiding it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the first preview at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The entire cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that performance but the guide recognised what had happened. “He understood I wasn’t in command but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not interacting with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director left the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s existence. It was a turning point in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were performing the show for the bulk of the year, slowly the stage fright went away, until I was poised and actively connecting to the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but enjoys his gigs, presenting his own verse. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his persona. “You’re not giving the room – it’s too much yourself, not enough character.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, echoes this. “Self-awareness and insecurity go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, relax, completely immerse yourself in the character. The issue is, ‘Can I allow space in my thoughts to allow the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all acting as the same woman in distinct periods of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve grown up doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could perform,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d experienced like that.” She managed, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all standing still, just speaking out into the dark. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to interact with. There were just the lines that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical symptoms that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to take a deep breath, like your air is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is no support to grasp.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint fellow actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this immense thing?’”
Zachary Hart points to imposter syndrome for triggering his stage fright. A back condition ended his aspirations to be a soccer player, and he was working as a fork-lift truck driver when a friend enrolled to acting school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total relief – and was superior than industrial jobs. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His initial 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 “terrified”. Some time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was chosen alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he spoke his opening line. “I heard my tone – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
